Dear Colleague,

Please forward this call for contributions to colleagues who may be
interested, and excuse us if you receive multiple copies of this email.


CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS
***********************************************************************
Workshop at HCI 2007 - Supporting Human Memory with Interactive Systems

HCI 2007, Lancaster 3 -7 Sept 2007 http://www.bcs-hci.org.uk/hci2007/
Call for Contributions http://diuf.unifr.ch/people/lalanned/MeMos07/
***********************************************************************

IMPORTANT DATES
---------------
 - July 25th, 2007 - Deadline for submission of position papers (in
camera-ready form, PDF format)
 - August 15th, 2007 - Author notification date
 - September 4th, 2007 - Date of the workshop at the HCI 2007 
 
WORKSHOP SCOPE
--------------
The major goal of this workshop is to explore how interactive systems can
support human memory, using novel technologies and innovative human/machine
interaction paradigms, such as tangible interaction. We believe this is
important since memory and attention are becoming critical resources for our
wellness, e.g. with regard to a continuously increasing information
overload. The goal of this workshop is not only to support personal
information management but also daily life activities, e.g. adapted to user
preferences and specific contexts. Where current multimedia search engines
are designed for large user communities and their applications, this
workshop targets the support of individual’s personal memory in everyday
life.

CALL FOR PARTICIPATION
----------------------
Interested participants are invited to submit a 4-page position paper using
the ACM-template, which can be found on the website indicated below. Papers
may address any topic related to the questions bellow. The organizers will
try to create a diverse mix of participants from academia as well as
industry and from different backgrounds and fields.

The aim of the workshop is to bring people together to discuss ongoing
studies on human memory, both user centred and technology driven, and to
address some of the following questions: 

- Human Memory: What human memory knowledge is needed to create optimal
memory support? How does memory relate with intentionality, action and
environment perception? (enaction theory) What are the known drawbacks of
our memory?

- Target group: Which groups of people could benefit most from human memory
support? Can we support people suffering from Alzheimer and dementia? How
can potential users be involved in the analysis, design, implementation and
evaluation process? 

- Evaluation: How do we evaluate memory support from the perspective of the
target group, interaction or interface design and supporting technologies?
What has been done in terms of evaluation thus far and what did the results
teach us? 

- Supporting Technologies: Which kind of technologies can be used to support
human memory? Which multimodal technology can help best supporting memory?
For which tasks and target group? And what is the context of use? 

- Tangible Interaction: Why is tangibility important? How can we assess
tangibility? What kinds of tangible objects are suitable for supporting
remembering, i.e. how does tangible object design relate to human memory?
Are personal tangibles more suitable than generic tangible objects for the
memory field? 

- Emotion-oriented interfaces: How can emotion-oriented computing help
supporting memory? How can a machine detect emotions and link it with
related information? How can a machine generate emotions and recall
memories? Can we use the knowledge that memories and emotions are closely
linked? 

- Personal Information Management and Visualization: Which novel information
mining and retrieval strategies are necessary to index and retrieve
memories? How to adapt and extend multimedia search engines to handle
personal memories? How to deal with the cross-modal nature of personal
memories and information? 

MOTIVATION
----------
Human memory is central in our daily life activities, not only to build
relationships with friends, create our identity or reminisce about the past
but also to drive our attention towards the most important tasks to perform
and to manage our lives. Information overload, memory and attention lacks
are crucial challenges to solve, not only for elderly people but also for
the rest of the society.

Numerous elderly have memory and attention problems, without speaking about
Alzheimer disease, which hinder their daily lives. Not only do they have
difficulties remembering appointments and tasks that need to be done, such
as buying bread or milk twice the same day, they might lose their glasses,
they have trouble remembering people and places, which can result in
insecurity, unsafe situations and melancholic feelings.

Younger people also face memory problems, especially with the constant
increase of information a person owns and handles. Not only the information
amount is growing fast, it is dematerializing and thus, people are often
experiencing the “lost-in-infospace” effect. Our documents are multiplying
in very large file hierarchies, our pictures are no longer stored in
photo-albums, our music CDs are taking the form of mp3 files, movies are
stored on hard-drives. Google and Microsoft recently tried to solve the
“lost-in-infospace” issue by providing, respectively, a desktop search
engine and a powerful email search engine, in attempt to minimize the effort
needed by people to organize their documents and access them later by
browsing. However, in order to find a file, one still has to remember a set
of keywords or at least remember its “virtual” existence. If one does not
remember having a certain document, browsing could be helpful, since it can
reveal related keywords and documents. Those, in turn, can help you remember
by association, like our human memory does. 

The process of “remembering” usually starts with a sensory cue which gives
you access to an associated memory. For example, we may see a picture of a
place visited in our childhood and the image cues recollections associated
to the content of the picture and trigger an emotional reaction
simultaneously. This information is generally easier to retrieve if it is
associated to a strong emotional experience or when it is rehearsed often
which can be facilitated by having physical objects related to memories,
such as souvenirs or photographs. Therefore tangible interaction systems
seem to have potential for supporting everyday human memory. Furthermore, it
appears that humans easily access and retrieve information when it is linked
to other related information or objects, either information or sounds,
smells, images, etc. which supports the idea of cross-modal indexing.

This workshop proposes to explore possible ways to support memory, by means
of interactive systems, to improve the wellness of people suffering from
memory or attention lacks or just everyday people in everyday situations.

WORKSHOP ORGANISERS
-------------------
Denis Lalanne - University of Fribourg, CH
Elise van den Hoven - Eindhoven University of Technology, NL

Please send the position papers and/or any question about the workshop to
the workshop organisers:
Denis Lalanne - [log in to unmask]
Elise van den Hoven - [log in to unmask]


--- 
+-------------------------------------------------------------------+
Denis Lalanne
Research scientist - DIVA group
Department of Informatics (DIUF)            phone: ++ 41 26 300 84 72
University of Fribourg                        fax: ++ 41 26 300 97 26
Bd de Pérolles 90 (B429)               e-mail: [log in to unmask]
CH-1700 Fribourg                 http://diuf.unifr.ch/people/lalanned
Switzerland
+-------------------------------------------------------------------+
 

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