I Have Officially Been Published!!!!!!

Exciting news!

A few weeks ago, my research group and I wrote a paper on our project and submitted it to the editor of the SIGACCESS newsletter. SIGACCESS is the Special Interest Group on Accessible Computing and it is part of the ACM (The Association for Computing Machinery). Basically, this is a big deal (EEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!).

Well I found out today that we are in! You can read my paper at:

http://www.sigaccess.org/community/newsletter/june_2009/


It is called Combating Obesity Trends in Teenagers Through Persuasive Mobile Technology.

We are now working on another paper for an upcoming conference called KI. Maybe we will get lucky again!


In un-related news, we got bored the other night and decided to take silly pictures. We were all outside trying to decide what to do, when someone said, "Wow, the way we are standing, we look like we should be on an album cover or something...." Just then, Katie came outside and somebody said, "Get the camera!"



Only 4 days left! The summer went by so fast! I'm going to miss everyone. Every person here is really cool and we all became fast friends. I'm already planning a trip to Boston to visit Katie at Olin College this fall. All in all, it was an amazing 9 weeks and I am so glad that I had the opportunity to travel to the west coast.

One week left :(

Hello!

It's been another busy couple of weeks. Now that we have the prototype done and the user testing is finished, we are in the process of data analysis. Basically, it means going over tons of transcripts of interviews to make sense of everything our test subjects had to say.

So, only one week left in California for me. While I may not be able to continue spending my weekends at the beach, I will be continuing my work on the iPhone app. I have been approved to keep working on this for my senior project! I would like to focus on the games aspect. Currently, we are using pre-made games with our application, which isn't ideal. I'm going to start writing games that we can put right into our application, which will allow us to automatically log data such as which games are played, and for how long.

We took a trip to the IBM Almaden research facility!

The lab is located in San Jose, about half an hour from Santa Cruz. We got to see a bunch of different departments. We saw the rapid prototyping department, which is home to this machine, which can fashion anything out of super strong plastic. We got souvenir IBM wrenches!

Here's the machine in full-swing:


And here's the super-cool wrench I got!
We saw a presentation about the work IBM is doing with lithium-ion batteries. In ten years, their aim is to have them be ten times more effective, so that all cars could be electric. It was a very compelling presentation -- if they actually accomplish this, by 2050 all cars could be electric.

We got to see the department where they keep the Blue Gene supercomputer. The computer is about the size of a closet. The man showing us the department asked where we were all from. I said, "Upstate New York" and he asked where. So I said, "Canton" and he replied, "Ohhh, you must be from St. Lawrence!" He then went on to say that he was from Clarkson, which is in Potsdam. Its a small world!


We also went to see A Midsummer Night's Dream, put on by Shakespeare Santa Cruz. The play was held at an outdoor theater on campus. It was crazy! In a clearing in the middle of the woods, there was a stage, with lights rigged to the trees surrounding. It was definitely an interesting (and cold!) experience.

We have a prototype!

After a lot of hard work, we have the alpha version of our iPhone app! The app is called Teenvity, and it incorporates all the work that Sonia (our grad student), Mo and I have been doing.


When you start the app, you can choose New Profile, which takes you to the personality test. After you submit your test, your 'personality code' gets written into a database. If you choose Continue, the program pulls up the most recent personality code and selects a list of games to play. We include games that require you to walk around--the iPhone has GPS, so it can sense your movements. We also have games that require arm movement, like a kung-fu game that requires you to shake the phone in a chopping motion.

After our initial focus group, we found that the participants responded fairly well to the female agent, but negatively to the male agent. Thus, I created two new agents, both female, to cater to different personalities.







We have also done a few user-testing sessions to gather feedback on what the teenagers like and what they would do differently. There's less than three weeks left! I feel like I am just getting used to working with the programs and soon it will be over! This week, our assignment is to create a poster for our project that we will be using for our final presentations. The cool thing here is, no posterboard and glue sticks for us -- we create our posters using PowerPoint, and then get them printed out on 36 by 48 inch paper. Pretty neat!

Last Saturday, we went to the beach (beginning to notice a pattern?). On Friday night, a few of us went downtown for a bit to browse through the stores. Outside, we noticed this awesome dog, just chilling out, waiting for its owner to come back:




This will be a hectic week. We are finishing up our user-testing sessions (there will be three more this week). We are also attending a seminar about games and psychology. On Thursday, we are going to Shakespeare Santa Cruz! We are seeing A Midsummer's Night Dream at this cool outdoor amphitheater in the woods at school. And, on Friday, we are all going on a trip to IBM Alamaden , which is one of their research facilities.

More to come!

Busy, Busy, Busy!

Hello!

Sorry I haven't posted in a while. Here are some updates from last week:

My birthday was on the 15th. My friends here are great! We all went out to an Italian restaurant called Kiante's for dinner and they even got me a mint chocolate icecream cake from Coldstone!


On the weekend, my friend Katie was going to visit some of her high school friends in Monterey, and offered to drive anyone who wanted to go sightseeing. We went to Cannery Row, which used to have sardine factories, and is famous for the John Steinbeck novels, Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday.



This is inside the Cannery Row Wax Museum.



We got our picture taken outside the Monterey Bay Aquarium:


We went walking along the coast and saw the Stanford Marine Station. They have a sanctuary for sea lions. We saw a bunch of them sunning themselves on the beach:


Here is one of the beaches we passed. Not too far from here is a nice grassy area, almost a cliff, overlooking the ocean, and apparently its a popular spot to get married. One wedding was wrapping up and another was getting started as we walked by!



After a day of walking along the coast, we sat in a nearby park to wait for Katie to pick us up. While we were waiting, we noticed a gopher and Jaakko put his camera on the ground right near the hole and took this video:





More to come! See you later!

Getting down to work....

Hi Everyone!

We are really making progress on our iPhone app. Our prototype is due to be ready next Wednesday. So, our app is designed to motivate teenagers to exercise based on their personality. My part of the project so far has been to create the interface for the personality test and save the user's score in a file so that every time they use the program, their personality results are saved.


Here is a screenshot of what the test will look like:


To create the application, we use a program called XCode that comes with an iPhone Simulator so that we can test out our programs before putting them on actual devices.

I also created two "agents" that say motivational phrases that are tailored to the user's personality to encourage them to engage in physical activity by playing games. Mo's part of the project has been finding already-existing games for the iPhone that we can link to and suggest to the user. There are a lot of outdoor games for the iPhone because it has a built-in accelerometer that senses movement, which makes it easy to track how much exercise someone is getting.

Here are screenshots of the two agents--the first one is nicer, asking politely "Why don't we play a game?", while the second agent is more like a drill sergeant, commanding the user to "Get out there and play for thirty minutes!".



On Wednesday, we went to a presentation about how to write a 'Statement of Purpose', something that is required for most grad school applications. We were then sent home with an assignment of writing a pretend statement to a school we are interested in applying to. We will then get our statements critiqued so that we can improve on them.

On Friday, we all went out to Pacific Thai for dinner. We called for a reservation of 16 and the waiter was very excited and said he'd have a table ready and waiting. The restaurant was very pretty; lots of beautiful paintings on the walls and a garland made up of origami cranes hung close to the ceiling. Here are a couple of photos:

On Saturday night, we stayed in and played some rousing games of Cranium and Pop 5--both trivia games with a twist--you have to do different activities such as acting out clues, humming, sculpting objects out of clay and even spelling words backward. My favorite part was when I got the card for "Chia Pet". My teammates had to guess this and the way I got them to guess it was by humming "Ch-Ch-Ch-CHIA!" like the jingle from the commercial. I had my doubts, but they got it!

On Sunday, we spent another relaxing day at the beach, this time a beach called Natural Bridges, which is down the road from the main beach at the boardwalk. It was nice and quiet, not so many people. I also managed to get a pretty nasty sunburn on my back and the backs of my legs. I will definitely know better for next time!

There is this cool rock off to the side of the beach:


And another week begins! See you later!

2nd Week

Hello!

My second week in California is done. We really got down to work! I will be very busy the next few weeks because the iPhone app that Mo and I are working on needs to have a working prototype ready in two weeks!

In other news, I got a new MacBook and iPod Touch to use for the project!


Just so you can see how small this laptop is, I put it next to my laptop. Quite a difference!



We've been doing a lot of activities after dinner this week. On Monday evening, we played volleyball. Here's my team, with Aaron and Patrick strategizing.


I actually hit the ball! Yay!


We also went hiking in the woods to this amazing climbing tree. This tree is huge and it has branches coming out from every direction.


On Tuesday, half of us went to see the Transformers movie. It was an action-packed couple of hours. The other half went hiking and found this sculpture of a 'slug'. The banana slug is the school's mascot.


On Thursday, we went to a gym downtown called The Pacific Edge to go wall-climbing. Aaron is an avid rock-climber and organized the trip.

Here he is climbing up a ridiculous stretch of wall:

Here I am, on a much easier route:

Everybody smile!


On the weekend, we went to a Japanese restaurant called Mobo and then went to a place called Surf City to play pool. It was a really neat place; rows upon rows of pool tables, with flat screen TVs and a jukebox. On Saturday, we went to the beach to relax and got to see a couple of fireworks. Fireworks are illegal in California, but apparently people shoot them off anyway.

That's all for now! Time to gear up for the week!

First Week in California!

Hi, Everybody!

I wanted a way for everyone to stay updated on what I am doing this summer, and a place to share photos, so I created this site. Hope you enjoy it!

So, I just began the SURF-IT program at UC Santa Cruz. My project is to write an application for the iPhone that helps motivate people to exercise.

Here are some pictures of the campus:

This is Engineering 2, or E2 as we call it.


There are so many deer on campus! They aren't even afraid of people.


The whole school is in the woods, it seems like. There's a ton of huge redwood trees. There's not a lot of traditional grass on campus. Probably saves them money on mowing, haha.



All the meadows around are this color. And since we're up high, we get a great view.




Here are some pictures of our first weekend. There are about 18 of us in the program and we're all getting along famously. We all trekked downtown on Friday night and overwhelmed a small Indian restaurant:

Then, we went to the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk, which is over a hundred years old and is one of the last seaside amusement parks on the west coast.



Deep-Fried Twinkies??????? I thought they were just a joke, but they're selling them here:


We got together for a group shot:


On Saturday, we went to the beach:


This is the beach where the boardwalk is and its huge. Its also free for everyone to use. Its a very popular place to go on the weekends. They have volleyball tournaments (you can see the nets behind us--there are actually about ten rows of nets) and there was a radio station sponsoring a karaoke contest too.


So, that was my first week! I hope you like the pictures, and please leave me comments, I'd love to hear from you!

-A