Current projects
Augmented Attention (2020)
The Augmented Attention project explores how, why, and when subtle digital augmentation of real-world situations could improve human agents’ experience and behaviour in those situations, enabling for instance novices of tasks to perform like pros. We currently study this by developing a social tabletop game in which cues and information is presented to the players over the whole reality-virtuality continuum (Milgram, 1994) making use of various levels of Augmented Reality display technologies. Eye tracking technologies are used both offline as empirical formative input to the game design process, and online (in situ) by the system to enable subtle attention guidance mechanisms as well as for assessing individual differences in gameplay styles and skill levels.
Student opportunities
Current thesis proposals associated with this research project are listed here.
Partners
The project was partially funded in 2019 by the Data Society research programand the Dept. of Computer Science and Media Technology, Malmö University. We are currently searching for industrial and academic partners interested in co-developing this project further.
Research themes
Situation recognition assistant systems
The universe is too large for a complete description. We can never completely describe a situation. As humans attempting to understand the significance of our situations we also deal with difficulties such as attention deficit, mental distraction, complex hand/eye coordination, limited field of view, or restricted mobility. To alleviate those constraints we propose to enhance the cognitive capabilities by providing situation recognition assistance systems (allow for hypothetical situations and intentional situations) to improve the human situation awareness. Keywords: situation recognition, intention recognition, assistant system, individualization, cognitive reasoning, situation modelling, learning, exclusive behaviours of human, retention/memory and forgetting techniques
Symbiotic attention management
An approach in making complex environments more comfortable in which interactive systems and human cognition are envisioned to more seamlessly interact and divide tasks (Jalaliniya et al., 2017). Emphasis is on the need for considering the nature of human attention when designing future potentially interruptive interactive systems and potentially let IoT devices share attention-related data and collaborate on the task of drawing human attention based on situation-adaptive heuristics.
Context-creating systems
Going beyond typical mobile context-aware applications, this theme explores systems able to create contextual cues to influence how individuals and groups of individuals act in mixed-reality environments. One target could be to help human agents focus on the right things in a potentially chaotic situation. Another could be to enable novice and expert game players to play literally the same game but where the novice get (nearly) imperceivable help. Keywords: Persuasive Technology, Augmented Reality, Peripheral Interaction, Attention management, Context-Aware systems.
Social robotics
The rapid development of AI combined with social robotics provides novel opportunities for learning and health. These systems utilize diverse technologies to understand and help make informed decisions from sensors that perceive social signals. Social robots provide an ideal way to perceive these social signals and to interact with people. The project explores how social robotics in the context of emotional wellness, ageing populations, and autism can support human engagement. The goal is to investigate the concept of personalised robotic coaches across therapy and education. Additionally, the projects ask how egocentric interaction can be used by other agents to perceive human actors.