My research interests are a bit disconnected but are generally in the realm of Human-Computer Interaction and Ubiquitous Computing (e.g., ambient displays, different modes of interaction, and information visualization). More specifically, I'm interested in designing for mobility and the representation of presence in shared spaces.
John Archibald Wheeler once joked, "Time is what stops everything from happening at once." Just as temporality is central to our experience of the world, it is also central to collaboration and our interactions with others. We are creatures of habit. Each day, we arrive at work in the morning by a certain time, take our lunch break at the same hour, and go home at roughly the same time in the evening. While many people are aware of this basic daily temporal pattern, they may not be aware of other temporal regularities that often occur in their day-to-day lives, patterns that occur on both a larger scale over a long period of time and micro-patterns that occur within a day.
When we interact with other people, much of our interaction is built around the convergence of each other's rhythms. I'd like to explore this interaction further. Specifically, I am investigating temporal patterns in the context of being online and using instant messaging programs. How does the knowledge of someone's IM rhythms affect the way you interact, coordinate, and collaborate with that person? What is the effect of this awareness on communication effectiveness?
Chen, J. (2008): "Playing with Surveillance." Position paper for the CHI 2008 workshop Interaction After Dark (Florence, Italy). [pdf]
Chen, J. (2007): "mopix: A Location-Based Mobile Photo Sharing System." Position paper for the ECSCW 2007 Doctoral Colloquium (Limerick, Ireland). [pdf]
Lindtner, S. and Chen, J. (2007): "mopix: Playful Encounters with Surveillance in Everyday Urban Settings." In Proceedings of UbiComp 2007 Extended Abstracts (Innsbruck, Austria).[poster] [pdf]
Chen, J. (2007): "Over and Under Surveillance." Position paper for the CHI 2007 workshop Imaging the City (San Jose, CA). [pdf] [jpg]
Rao, S., Chen, J., Jeffries, R., and Boardman, R. "You've Got IMs!: How People Manage Concurrent Instant Messages." To be published. [pdf]
Organizing committee member for the ISR Graduate Research Forum, Irvine, CA, June 2007.
"How Do People Manage Multiple IMs?" Presented at Google Inc., Mountain View, CA, June 2005.
"Privacy in Collaboration: Managing Impression." Presented at the International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction on behalf of S. Patil, Las Vegas, NV, July 2005.
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mopix a location-based mobile photo sharing system |
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rhythIMs visualizing temporal patterns of online presence |
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gridlock a probabilistic congestion map generator of field programmable gate array routing architectures |
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you've got IMs an ethnographic study of the management of informal communication |
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eco-informatics a collaborative information system |
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gamescrafters a finite perfect-information game generator |
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adaptive go with the winners an adaptive probabilistic algorithm for finding large patterns in a database |
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