**prompt: "2020 In what ways have you applied the results of your projects to the real world? What impact did you have on society as a consequence?

Living in the year 2020, we take for granted our JITIR (just-in-time information retrieval) displays and sensing devices that tell us what we need to know when we need to know it. But just 10 years ago, people had to manually look up information on their ``cellular telephones'' and ``laptop or desktop'' computers. How did people keep track of all of the things they had to do? People manually managed information existing across many applications and locations, making it impossible to easily figure out the best thing to do.

Ten years ago, I realized that there was the need for change. People were constantly bombarded with information from their newly connected environments. Faced with more choices and opportunities than they could manage, people overcommitted beyond their capacities, leading to a pandemic of unreliability, stress, and distraction. People needed a way to better organize their priorities, manage their time and attention, and to find a way to make effective use of the information that was flooding their lives instead of letting it sap their time and energy.

Given this situation, I sought to change the focus of personal information management as follows: rather than helping people accomplish tasks faster, my system helps them make better decisions about which tasks were important and how to accomplish them more effectively. In this essay I discuss the creation and use of this system, and my concerns and predictions for this system in 2030.

ASC: Artificial Second Conscience
From my first visit to Japan, I was struck by the value placed on introspection and understanding through self-reflection such as that achieved in meditation, the practice of seeking focus and simplicity within a chaotic lifestyle. In 2010, the “interrupt- driven lifestyle’, multi-tasking in disrupted environments, had long been commonplace. The effects of this lifestyle, such as feeling stressed, disorganized and overwhelmed, were correlated with a lack of self understanding, suggesting a need for informed self reflection. To address these problems, I sought to create interfaces that enhance the user’s self-awareness, decision making ability, and ease their cognitive load. Based on this philosophy I created the interfaces that make up ASC: Artificial Second Conscience.

Artificial Second Conscience, or ASC, began in 2010. The initial concept was a tool that allowed users to customize displays of their personal activities. Rather than treating data feeds as simply public or private– ASC allows users to selectively share every facet of their condition and life activities with portions of friends and professionals. For example, many users share their location, web-pages, stress levels with their friends and may share their diet, brain and emotional records with their psychologist. In daily life, this allows for a much more adaptive assistive technologies such as context-reactive automation, user-knowledge aware information retrieval and cross informed relationship management. Later, I describe a scenario where we follow an ASC user, Patrick, through preparing for work, managing a personal relationship and reading the news.

My contribution to this project was architecting and building a way to interface with available data from persona sensors, friends and public data across many worn and otherwise personal devices. I worked with a team to bring my web-based implementation of this system to life as a multi-device interface. We combined heterogeneous activity tracking from life-tracking and social services, applied user customizable sense-making to this data and visualized this information in direct manipulation interfaces, allowing the display of this information adapt to the user’s current information needs and psychological state.

Automation
By treating feeds from personal devices and social services as sensor streams, these feeds are used to drive simple adaptive, context-reactive automation, which can act to take care specified tasks without user supervision. This allows for users to offload mundane tasks like reminders, messaging and other device automation to lower their daily information overhead. For specifying rules, we began with a simple controlled natural language interface, “send me my grocery list when I am at the grocery store”, which has grown to support shared rules and a variety of textual, spoken and by-demonstration input.

Recommendation
The capabilities originally envisioned by the MEMEX, a device in which an individual may store and easily reference their entire life history, have long become commonplace. Integrated ambient sensors provide the user with up to date information about their current condition with a comparative analysis against past conditions. For example, a user can ask the system to recommend lunch options based on their current nutrient deficiencies and caloric intake, and additionally, statistically weigh whether he/she will like the food based on past meals. ASC greatly extends from the MEMEX vision by also being able to access shared and public data to socially inform, evaluate and recommend items. For example when one is looking for an apartment, neighborhoods can be programmatically and visually compared based on user business reviews, climate and crime statistics and additionally this information can be filtered the user’s social circle, stated preferences and other preferences inferred by activity records.

Information Retrieval
Personalized asisstive technologies, such as ASC, have lead to end user tailored content views– allowing for appropriate timing of information presentation, and less unnecessary information being presented overall. By keeping track of what the user “knows,” commonly skims over or has been presented many times before, ASC is able to adapt the amount and method of information display in content such as lectures and news. Additionally, content is annotated with visualizations of peer and global point of view differences. The ASC display allows the user to receive information about what is going on in the world in a variety of a personalized, socially informed mediums– a personal automatic new anchor, informed textual display and audio, as well as unobtrusive device specific update mechanisms.

AIL vs Agents of the Semantic Web
Although the vision of the semantic web user agents– robots that automatically complete tasks on behalf of their user– has finally been realized, this direct inference and reasoning is rarely used except in highly specialized large scale sales. As we commonly see when we look for an apartment, even when consulting with an actual human being with perfect knowledge of the individuals preferences and the available options, the end user still makes the final decision. People are both good at and like making decisions if given the appropriate information. Unlike user agents, which make decisions for you, ASC merely makes the information layer more visible in daily life. The goal of ASC is simply to help people know what they need to know, when they need to know it by using linked-data feeds for social awareness, memory augmentation and informed decision making.

...for a link to the full paper click here

Since people naturally use narrative to convey past events to others, we thought that allowing Poyozo to represent captured user activity data in textual narrative form would allow this data to be more immediately meaningful and evocative. This led us devise PLAN, a notation which, like the proposed activitystrea.ms format is used to express sequences of sensed activities, but which is designed for human-consumption as well– specifically, it is designed to be easy for people to read, edit, and author. Reducing the barrier to authoring and editing captured data is important to the system because it enables users to effectively engage in a dialog with the system, fixing erroneous sensor data, supplementing activity logs with new data (sensor-unobservable) data, and deleting undesired records.

PLANs syntactically look like meeting agendas: each PLAN is an ordered sequence of consecutive events under a common “episode” (short period of time, analogous to a meeting), where each event consists of a timestamp, optional subject, action (predicate), object, and optional duration. When the subject is omitted, the user’s own self is implied; this allows entries to remain succinct and easy to read. Example PLAN sequences and full spec coming soon.

Raw captured activity logs generated by sensors often are extremely detailed and voluminous; the sheer quantity of such entries often makes reading PLANs tedious and overwhelming. For example, Poyozo captures every action performed by the user as s/he navigates the web, including querying search engines, switching tabs, and intermediate pages viewed while seeking information.

Thus instead of dumping raw activity logs as PLANs, Poyozo generates PLANs as responses to queries which can restrict and filter which events are selected in various ways. Queries can select events by subject (user performing the action), action type, or object that the action is being performed upon. Furthermore, queries can be set to include only events that take more than a certain duration, or which exceed a combined uniqueness-importance measure analogous to TF-IDF for document retrieval. For filters with thresholds, Poyozo provides a graphical slider which can be used to interactively expand or restrict returned results.

created in collaboration with Max Van Kleek

The web, personal computers and instant ubiquitous digital communications have brought unprecedented constant demands on our attention. As a result, people do not spend as much time thinking, reflecting upon situations, decisions and activities as they used to. As a consequence, people feel less organized, and often lack the situational clarity to make informed decisions. We present an ongoing project, Poyozo, designed to make self-reflection an integral part of daily personal information management activity, and to provide facilities for fostering greater self-understanding through exploration of captured personal activity logs. We describe an application that visualizes such personal activity logs using many available “life-tracking” tools, and uses visual and textual PIM metaphors to convey this information in a familiar way that is personally relevant and meaningful.

One day detail view of the Poyozo calendar in text mode(a) using PLAN to show a list of the most significant events occurring on that day, and graphs mode(b) allowing users to correlate events and activity statistics.

Poyozo uses automatically captured activity logs to promote self-understanding by contextualizing self-refection within common PIM practice, and by using visual and textual PIM metaphors to convey this information in a familiar way that is personally relevant and meaningful. Furthermore, we demonstrate that many of the various ``life-tracking'' tools available today provide a simple means of heterogeneous activity tracking without need for additional sensing or infrastructure. The ultimate goal of the system is to determine whether appropriately summarizing and presenting a user's captured activity data, can have a positive effect on his or her ability to make informed decisions, self-image, perceived quality of life.

for a more detailed explanation see our CHI2010 workshop submission here
created in collaboration with Max Van Kleek, David Karger and mc schrafel

Today, we rely increasingly on the Web for a multitude of everyday activities that run the gamut from simple queries to complex social interactions. As a result, our browsing patterns are starting to reflect the intricate and multi-faceted nature of our daily lives, but web browsers retain little of the nuanced richness of this information beyond simple “page histories” of previously visited sites. Analytics providers such as Google and Alexa regularly collect statistics of browsing activity, but such analytics are sitecentric and not clustered around individual end-users. Moreover, despite the social nature of web browsing, individuals have little awareness of what others are looking at and how often; while sites like del.icio.us facilitate social exploration, they focus on what people choose to share rather than on their actual habits.

When we created Eyebrowse, we sought to allow users to capture their web browsing activity to examine whether it could help them better understand how they and their friends use the web. Specifically, Eyebrows allowed people to examine long term patterns in their web browsing activity and facilitates sharing, comparison, and increased social awareness of browsing patterns among friends. and finally, to form a public, democratized corpus of web browsing data for the research community. So, how much are people willing to share, and how does sharing impact the web browsing experiences and habits of the individual?

After three weeks, we have over 200 users sharing selected portions of their web browsing activity. We surveyed some of them and found that public web browsing was most useful to them for seeing socially derived information in context of their own web browsing activity and for viewing other users profiles for the purposes of social awareness and information discovery. Almost all users reported social- or work-related privacy concerns and their comments indicated a fear of being misrepresented by their web browsing activity. To help cope with this we are considering implementing a ‘greylist’ that would hide specific page titles, but track overall activity and multiple whitelists, such as one for home, and one for work.


We plan to continue to grow Eyebrowse into a service that supports social browsing through collaborative filtering and other crowd-sourcing techniques, promotes self-awareness among users of both the patterns in their browsing activities, and provides researchers with useful web browsing data without violating the users’ privacy sensibilities.

Thanks to all our users and supporters! We were recently featured on infosthetics!

This post can also be found on the MIT CSAIL Haystack Blog

“Man is least in himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.”
- Oscar Wilde

Enter the anonymous, masked, world of 4chan. A world full of racism, gay bashing, to gays bashing gays and fathers asking for pictures of girls their daughter's age. Horrifying? Weird? Why? Fascinating! The community is creative without any named creators. Its close to transparent as you can get, and yet it still holds onto solid beliefs. The freedom to live a complete moral fiction is something niche communities have tried to achieve, but masked behind screens and keyboards, anonymous masked interaction can be taken to a whole new level. 4chan is a truly blank virtual world, with none of the rules and regulations of the former.

A real world example of masked communities: Someone on the top of a building about to jump. If the audience is a small local group, people will generally abide by social norms and encourage the person to step back. But, if the group below is so large that the individuals in the crowd are 'masked' so to speak, people will begin to yell, 'jump,' 'do it' etc. Interesting, scary, but interesting. Now, how does this translate online?

With the opportunity to ignore cultural moralities 4chan has invented its own. It is perhaps the 1st social community with enough unique characteristics to be declared the 1st online civilization. 4chan may be an amoral place but we are living in some amazing wonderful times when people have the freedom to easily redefine who the are and self organize however they please, as long as it's for the LULZ, of course.

I am interested in how our personal information and usage habits are used by web companies as a business model to support the free services they provide. It is shocking that their policies can change, a company can alter the terms of use and have it applied retroactively (ie: facebook) This is all well and good not, while we, the users, still have a great deal of power to influence policy (Change Your Terms of Service Back NOW), but these grounds are always being tested, and I would venture to say that the Facebook policy change was just that, a test.

Compared directly against relatively anonomised residual data, such as Google tracking and analyzing of our browsing habits, Facebook data collection seems invasive, like someone peering into your HS yearbook to look for insider marketing tips on teens. Their tracking seems somewhat innocent, it is used to sell us things better, it's not big brother following us through our O so interesting lives. Why worry when keeping the users happy is in the best interest of Facebook the business? They need to make money and to make more money they need millions of happy users happily surrendering their privacy, one trench at a time. How are they going to do this you ask?

Trench warfare between user privacy and the advertiser/application. Regardless of how intentional the recent events were, they are now be studied as tests. We should watch out, we are playing games with our privacy whether we like it or not. 2 major concerns.

:::: What is in a companies best interest is not your best interest. It is important to realize that although they may be providing you with a service you appreciate, together you have made no contract.

::: "Critical Mass." My lack of fear is based on this idea that the users are still in control. If Facebook begins actively and visibly leveraging users data, users will flee to a competing service and Facebook will loose money. But, really, how willing are users to drop their investment in Facebook?

The most powerful example of personal privacy being tested online certainly the last.fm u2 album leak fiasco. The fear that last.fm users information was being shared with record companies around the u2 album leak (article) lead to many users deleting their accounts and abandoning the service entirely. What does this say? Even with the hard stats, would have no way to judge the significance of those numbers. But this idea that at last.fm, both users and employees would revolt is empowering for the masses, and since no event in recent memory exists, this fear of revolt is paralyzing for all involved. So here we are…'personal privacy trench warfare.'