Measuring Trust in Wi-Fi Hotspots

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Summary
In Measuring Trust in Wi-Fi Hotspots, the researchers wanted to study the effects of appearance of electronic communication websites on trust of the website or service. For their experiment, they setup at a couple of different locations (restaurants that provided food, drinks, and free Wi-Fi internet) and equipped each location with a "fake" Wi-Fi hotspot that patrons of the restaurant could connect to. When a user tried to connect to their hotspot, the homepage was shown with an image. They were asked to enter their mobile phone number (even though the service was free), and then were given a keycode to get access to the internet. After entering the keycode correctly, they were sent to a webpage with a debriefing message to explain what this experiment was about, and also assure them that their phone number would not be stolen. The main quality measure in this experiment was: Does a location-specific image on the homepage of a wireless internet hotspot affect the likeliness that a person will accept the hotspot as being secure and safe? The participants were divided into two sections:

• Those that connected to the website and saw an image of the restaurant that they were at or a picture of the city they were in.
• Those that connected to the website and saw a random image that did not correlate with the location they were in.

The researchers found that people were much more likely to give out their mobile phone number to a website that had the picture of the location they were in, even if it was an unfamiliar website that was asking for information (the phone number) that didn't seem necessarily, showing us interesting data about how trusting internet users are and how easy it is to fake, or "phish," a website or email from a fake provider.

Discussion
This seemed a little scary because I have traveled to different areas and connected to Wi-Fi networks that I had no proof were safe. If these researchers could easily add their own hotspot, then a hacker that wants to steal all of my information can do the same. This paper has definitely led me to reconsider how easily I trust sources on the internet or emails that are sent to me, and especially reconsider how easily I trust wireless access points.

Obedience to Authority

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Summary
Obedience to Authority is Stanley Milgram's account of his famous and controversial experiments into the origins of obedience. The basic procedure of his experiment were as follows. A volunteer was brought into the lab at Yale University to participate in a study on "memory and learning." The volunteer was given the role of the "teacher," while another volunteer who was actually a volunteer working with the experimenter was given the role of the "learner." The teacher was instructed to read a list of word pairs to the learner, who was hooked up to an electric shock machine in the other room. Then, the teacher would ask a few questions about the word pairs, and if the learner got any of the answers wrong, the teacher was to shock him using a generator machine, increasing the voltage for each wrong answer. The voltage levels on the machine were labeled from "mild shock" to "severe shock" to "extreme shock" to "XXX," implying death. As the shock levels rose higher, the learner started to scream in pain and demand to be let out of the experiment, but the experimenter continually stressed that the experiment must go on and that the shocks did no permanent tissue damage. In reality, the learner was not actually being shocked, but instead acting in order to convince the teacher they were actually causing him harm.


Milgram found that generally about 60% of the participants were willing to shock the victim all the way to the last level of voltage, 450 volts, or supposed death. He made a few observations about the situation and explained the results in these ways:

• When an autonomous person is put into a situation with a perceived authority, they automatically give up their autonomy and follow the experimenter.
• Regardless of the fact that they felt what they were doing was morally wrong, the subject is still unable to break out of the perceived obedience and power hierarchy.
• Even when in close proximity to the subject, the victim would still follow the orders of the experimenter,  suggesting that they had lowered the status of the victim in their mind.
• Whenever an ordinary man gave the orders to shock and the experimenter was the "victim," the subject would listen to the experimenter's demands to stop the shocking, showing that the authority must have some sort of credibility (or at least claim to have some).
• When the experimenter was not in the room, the subject did not feel obligated to shock at the high levels, showing that when the structure of obedience and authority is broken, the person is free.
• The person does not feel responsibility for their actions in an authority structure because "they were just following orders" and the authority is the one with the responsibility.
• Lastly, whenever the subject was given a choice of what shock level to use, they continued to use smaller shock levels, showing that the act of shocking at the higher levels was not an outlet for the subject to get out their aggression but instead an act of obedience to the experimenter.

While his experiments did not completely sum up the ideas of obedience, he did show (in a controversial way) the extreme effects that situation have on an individuals propensity to act in horrible ways, and that it was not just the horrible character and nature of the subjects.

Discussion
This book was extremely interesting - it was definitely one of the best chapters of Opening Skinner's Box. While I would like to say that I would not have shocked all the way to the last level, I also know the nature of how I was brought up (and how many other people in America are brought up) to respect authority and always listen. Even though through my childhood I hated authority and would always talk bad about and resent those who had authority but did not deserve it, I never had the courage to actually stand up to that authority and do what I wanted to do. So, I can definitely see how these participants came to trust and respect the experimenter and were scared to go against him because of his position of authority. Especially interesting was the fact that the subjects that had access to the phone would tell the experimenter they were shocking at higher levels when they would actually shock at a lower level. To me, this showed that they were scared to defy the experimenter to his face but would do it if he wouldn't find out. Sounds kinda like doing something your parent's told you not to do when they're not home! In all, this book was extremely interesting, and impressive in the detail and experiment configurations that Milgram went through to thoroughly prove the nature of obedience to authority.

Seeing is retrieving: building information context from what the user sees

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Summary
In Seeing is retrieving: building information context from what the user sees,  the researchers present a new system called "SeeTrieve" that helps classify documents based on the context that they are used in, and not just the actual contents of the file. Instead of storing the file contents, the SeeTrieve system stores the text that is stored around the document - that is, the text that is in the options used and other data within the application. It stores these text snippets and maps them to the documents that were used while these snippets were on the screen. As SeeTrieve only captures text the user views, it is more accurate for content recollection than a system that indexes large amounts of HTML data not seen by the user or many pages of a PDF that were never viewed. The picture below shows the way that text snippets are linked to files using a term index:

SeeTrieve takes in actions into a stream, in which each event has a timestamp. Anytime that a file is opened and later closed in an application, all of the text snippets that occur during the life of that file are associated with the file. It acquires the text snippets primarily through the accessibility functionality of most applications. Whenever any window changes visibility, a text snippet is made of the window and inserted into the trace of events; another snapshot is made every 3 seconds to catch events where the text has changed but the visibility of the window has not.

Evaluation of this retrieval system showed that it was much more successful for finding content than a traditional content-based search engine such as Google Desktop was. One example was that in a search for the name "James Gleick," SeeTrieve found the file "log1.jpg", because the text "James Gleick" was shown on the screen during the viewing of that image, but Google Desktop did not find that file, because the name was not anywhere in the content of the file. This showed that context-based searching is much more effective than searching just by context.

Discussion
I thought this system sounded amazing, and would not be surprised if we saw it included on most systems in the future. I have always thought that the one drawback of using traditional search systems whether used on a local computer or on the internet was that it only could search the file names, description, or text inside (if it's a text file), and could lose some semantic information based on the way it is used, or the way it is stored. While Google Images does this in a way (because it also searches for text on the webpage that an image is found on and not just the name and description of the image), it is not as thorough and useful as this system.

An Interactive Game Design Assistant

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Jill

Summary

In An Interactive Game-Design Assistant, Mark J. Nelsom and Michael Mateas present a new tool that will help users with a low budget or no development knowledge design a game. Current tools on the market today help the user with the programming and graphics side of the development process, allowing for easy libraries and visual tools to let these novices develop their own video games. But, there are currently no tools that help the user with the design process - mapping game rules to rules within the system, helping the user make their topic of interest most prominent while exploiting the useful characteristics of games. The system that the researchers created is a game-design assistant that provides suggestions or automates the process of game design, helping the developers define the space of their game in real-world and common-sense terms.

This system would work in two ways:

• Giving feedback to the user on the state of their current design.
• Suggesting modifications and additions in an intelligent way

It would also include example rules, layouts, story designs, and themes that the user could put together to form an abstract view of their game, allowing more detailed work in a later stage.

The user can input design constraints to the actions that the user can do in a certain situation, and the system can present a prototype of that game or give extra suggestions in that way. The picture below shows an example of specifying the relationship between an "attacker" and an "avoider."

Discussion
This seems pretty interesting that in addition to extra software that helps the user with the programming part of the process that a normal user could create an interactive game. While the game is not likely to be very intuitive or look very great, allowing a novice user to try out game development with "training wheels" could inspire them to create their own games that are more complex and do not use these helpful recommendation systems. This is similiar to "beginner" musical instruments, where the user can move on to more difficult instruments that have a greater musical range if they are interested in it.

An Intelligent Fitting Room Using Multi-Camera Perception

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Summary
In An Intelligent Fitting Room Using Multi-Camera Perception, the researchers present a new way for evaluating which clothes to buy in a physical shopping situation. The system is made to be placed right outside of fitting rooms (not in the area where you actually change clothes, but in the lobby). The system consists of multiple cameras that can capture the user from multiple angles, as well as three screens. The center screen is for showing the current image of the user (just like a mirror). The left screen is for showing the past image of the user wearing the last thing that they tried on. This image will animate and change in real time with the movements of the user, so that if they turn around to see the back of their body, they can see what their back looked like with the past clothing as well. And lastly, the right screen is for showing social networking information based on the clothing being tried on. The cameras can identify the clothing, pull up information from a social fashion network, and show images of other people wearing similar clothing in order to see if the clothes are in style or not. The image below shows the construction of the system:




And the image below shows the prototype used to test the system:





The recognition system recognized user poses that were hard coded into the system, and recognized clothes based on texture, color, sleeves, collar, and other things.




Discussion
This system seems like it would be really awesome and really help the shopping experience go by a lot quicker. And, the idea that advertisements could be played on the screen while there is no one using it would definitely appeal to stores. But, it seems like it would be an extremely expensive addition to current stores, and probably could only be afforded by expensive boutique stores - the kind that look almost empty and only have 4 or 5 outfits to choose from, making it useless anyway.

Automatic Evaluation of Assistive Interfaces: IUI 2008

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Summary
In Automatic Evaluation of Assistive Interfaces, the researchers wanted to take existing HCI user modeling programs and extend them to simulate the actions of disabled users. HCI modelling programs are used to evaluate interfaces by providing a simulated "user" that performs optimally in the interface. But, there is no current model that simulates a disabled user of the system. The researchers wanted to present a new model that would simulate the disabled user as well as a normal user in order to evaluate an "assistive interface" (one that helps disabled users with the system) without having to find lots of disabled people to test the system.

The system was built to simulate many different things:

• Simulating the Practice Phase: Assuming that the user had no idea how to use the system, and could not read the buttons but knew where they were (a blind person and the 'tab' key), the model could try out different options and learn from the feedback.
• Visual Simulation: Using the actions of the keyboard and positions of the mouse, the interface can track the "visual location" of the eyes in order to change interaction and assist the user.
• Motor Simulation: Using a variety of specified disabilities, the model was able to simulate the time it would take for the user to select an option or use the mouse, allowing the interface to be evaluated and new interaction paradigms developed.

In general, the model that the researchers developed was able to accurately simulate a variety of disabilities in order to evaluate assitive interfaces without the need for lots of participants.

Discussion
While this seems useful for developers who want to save time developing applications, it seems that we would still need to do user studies with actual participants that are disabled and get their input into how they would like an interface to work. In general, models are an approximation to reality, and it doesn't seem that you could produce an accurate model to exactly simulate a disabled person (except if you have a model that would only navigate through audible feedback, possibly).

Opening Skinner's Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century

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Jill

Summary

In Opening Skinner's Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century, Lauren Slater details ten of the greatest psychological experiments of this past century that have shaped the way we think about the human mind and human behavior. She narrates the stories of these researchers and their work as if we are reading a story or watching a movie. The researchers she describes are:

• B. F. Skinner: Skinner experimented with rats and conditioning, and found that the mind is extremely receptive to rewards, which strengthen conditioning, and that the mind is not as receptive to punishment, which weakens conditioning.
• Stanley Milgram: Milgram designed an experiment where the participant was told to shock another participant up until the point where the shock would deliver death, and found that 65% of participants shocked up until death. His experiments taught us a lot about human's obedience to authority.
• David Rosenhan: Rosenhan and some helpers admitted themselves into mental hospitals saying that they were hearing a voice that said "thud". They found that even though they were perfectly sane, and said so after being admitted, they still would be kept in the hospital for a long time, and psychologists would swear that they were psychotic. This showed the subjectiveness of psychiatric diagnosis.
• John Darley and Bibb Latane: Darley and Latane, through their experiments, found that when a crisis happened and someone needed help, that if a bystander perceived there were lots of other people there, would not help. These people would wait a long time, and would never truly decide on whether to help or not. But, when they thought they were the only person there to help, they would help almost immediately.
• Leon Festinger: Festinger studied the way that people will change their ideas and beliefs based on their actions, primarily studying the way that cult members reacted whenever the "day of judgement" and the end of the world did not come as they had predicted.
• Harry Harlow: Harlow studied how infant monkeys came to be attached to a fake "mother" that had soft cloths on it, versus a mother that was hard and metal but provided food. He found that love does not have to do with providing resources and food, but instead has an aspect of touch as well as motion.
• Bruce Alexander: In order to study the nature of addiction, Alexander placed some rats in a nice, clean environment, and others in a solitary, confined environment, and gave each of the rats water laced with morphine, and some regular water. They found that the rats in the bad conditions liked the morphine, while the rats with the nice environment didn't like the morphine, suggesting that addiction is not a physical dependency but instead a result of situation.
• Elizabeth Loftus: Loftus showed that memories of our past quickly disintegrate and that we can never trust them. She helped participants in her experiments "remember" fake memories of being lost in the mall, and the participants were almost 100% sure that they had remembered this fake memory.
• Eric Kandel: Kandel showed that memory is strengthened by increasing the strength of connections between neurons, and that a specific substance called CREB helps that strengthening.
• Antonio Moniz: Moniz pioneered the practice of brain surgery, specifically the lobotomy, in order to treat patients that had depressed or psychosis. While further refined, a lot of his techniques are used today.

In all, Slater presented some great examples of important psychological experiments that have shaped and changed the field as practiced today.

Discussion

I actually really liked this book because of the way that Slater wrote. She formulated and changed all of these boring experiments to be interesting stories that really give great insight into the human mind. Especially interesting is the fact that while many of these discoveries are of grave import, and should change the field completely, psychologists today still widely discredit them and continue to believe otherwise. One such example is the addiction example, as kids today are still taught that drug addition is physical.