All posts filed under “conferences”

June 24, 2015

Honorable Mention Award @ MobileHCI 2015: The Challenges of Mobile Phone Usage Data

A collaborative paper with Denzil Ferreira of University of Oulu, Nikola Banovic of Carnegie Mellon University and Kent Lyons a past colleague from Yahoo, in which we explore the challenges of mobile phone usage data through an analysis of three diverse smartphone application usage datasets, has been given an honorable mention award for the upcoming Mobile HCI 2015 conference in Denmark.

The goal of this work was to broaden our understanding of smartphone usage by investigating if differences in mobile device usage occurred not only across our three datasets, but also in relation to prior work. We provide an extensive review of prior work on related mobile data sets and mobile studies, present details of our comparative analysis focusing on top apps and micro-usage behaviors but most importantly we discuss the challenges and issues of conducting mobile research of this nature and reflect on caveats related to the replicability and generalizability of such work.

We’re delighted with the award / nomination!

Denzil worked on a beautiful visual table in our review of related work (see below). And you can read a pre-print of the paper here.

literature-final

April 28, 2015

Presentation @ CHI2015: Understanding mobile search & app interactions

Last week JP Carrascal presented our study on the interactions between mobile search and mobile apps at CHI 2015 in Seoul, Korea. JP did a fantastic job presenting and handled the flurry of questions afterwards very well! In fact JP gave two talks in the same “Understanding Everyday Use of Mobile Phones” session chaired by Matt Jones!

The idea behind this work is to understand more about the behaviors and motivations around smartphone users transitioning between mobile search engines and mobile apps (and vice versa) when trying to find information to satisfy their daily information needs. We were also interested in exploring the various triggers and actions associated with mobile search. To shed some light on these mobile search and app interactions we designed and conducted a 2-week, mixed-method study involving 18 Android users in the Bay Area. The deck explains the core motivations, approach alongside key results. Questions or comments feel free to contact JP or I. And if interested in reading the full CHI 2015 paper it’s available here.


February 5, 2015

CHI 2015 Work-in-progress (WIP) Accepted – Location Requirements in Local Search


We have just had a CHI WIP accepted for presented in Seoul, Korea in April 2015! WooHoo 🙂 This work-in-progress paper was conducted with Henriette Cramer in which we conducted a large-scale survey via Mechanical Turk to shed light on what factors of location are important when choosing a target place of interest in a local search scenario, namely restaurant search.

The survey was deployed in December 2013 and collected a range of demographic information as well as details regarding participants’ current and most recent locations. The core of the survey was a local restaurant search scenario in which participants were asked to provide freeform textual responses to the following question: Read More

December 21, 2014

CHI 2015 Paper Accepted! An In-Situ Study on Mobile App & Mobile Search Interactions


We recently discovered that all our hard word has paid off! This past summer, JP Carrascal (a PhD candidate from UPF, Barcelona) and I worked together on a study to understand more about if and how mobile search and mobile app usage interacts. And a full CHI paper reporting our findings has been accepted for publication at CHI 2015 in Korea!

The motivation behind this work is that smartphone users spend much of their time transitioning between mobile search engines and mobile apps (and vice versa) when trying to find information. The figure below helps highlight this fact. The figure shows the timeline of mobile device interactions for a 1 hour period of a single day for an actual participant in our study, showing sequences of mobile device interactions in the form of mobile app launches, home screen interactions and mobile searches. Read More

December 3, 2013

TOCHI Paper Accepted! A large-scale study of daily information needs captured in-situ

After 2 years of work and many revisions, our paper describing a large-scale study of daily information needs has been accepted to ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI). And what’s even more exciting is that we will be presenting the work at CHI 2014 🙂… Read more