HCI 2006: Auto-Recorded Data and the Ethics of Collection

The 2006 Workshop on "Computer Assisted Recording, Pre-Processing, and Analysis of User Interaction Data" took place as part of HCI2006, led by Willem-Paul Brinkman of Brunel University with co-organisers Phil Gray and Karen Renaud of the University of Glasgow.

The goal was to bring together both tool developers and people with an interest in understanding interaction behaviour to discuss work and explore new issues related to recorded user-system interaction data to inform the design process.

The organisers suggest that although computer-assisted recording, pre-processing and analysis of user interaction behaviour has received continuing research attention over the years, its full potential as a data source to inform the design process is still unrealised. 'With technologies such as broadband internet and distributed applications, it is possible to continuously and unobtrusively collect interaction data. This data can relate to keypresses, mouse movements, eye gaze, as well as high-level events such as completing a task.'

Which types of analysis and measures give us design-relevant insight into the interaction, the users, their interaction problems, their needs, personality, and experience? Making the data and tools easily accessible to designers and software engineers might even more directly impact upon the quality of the application, than supporting researchers and classic consumers of behavioural data such as psychologists, they argue.

Presentations included:
* "Auto-classifying salient content in video" by Alistair Morrison, Paul Tennent, John Williamson, and Matthew Chalmers.
* "Integrating data from multiple contexts by Joshua Underwood, Hilary Smith, Rosemary Luckin, Benedict du Boulay, Joe Holmberg, Lucinda Kerawalla, and Hilary Tunley.
* "Towards extracting personality trait data from interaction behaviour" by Nick Fine and Willem-Paul Brinkman.
* "Automatic generation of multimodal interaction models from behavioural data" by Marie-Luce Bourguet.
* "Tracking task context to support resumption" by Damien Clauzel, Claudia Roda, and Georgi Stojanov.

In addition to analyses and software demonstrations, there were discussions that focussed on ethical dimensions of data capture. The issue of trust loomed large and the researcher's responsibility to make people aware that data is being recorded. Part of the tension is that what is collected now may be more tractable to analysis in years to come. What if someone wanted to revoke permission for their data to be used after five years? 'It gets interesting...,' said Brinkman. It is not just an issue of making subjects aware of the collection, but they have to understand what it means.

Associated Link: The workshop website

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