Talks by Nils Jäger and Stuart Reeves

Nils Jäger - Adaptive Architecture and Collocation

I will be talking about a paper currently under review in which we discuss part of my PhD work on Adaptive Architecture. We specifically focus on collocated interactions within a novel adaptive environment called WABI, which I designed and built during my PhD. WABI adapts kinetically to the physiological behaviour (respiration and heart rate) of its two inhabitants. We argue that the environment is an additional collocated agent and participates in the interaction. Key to the participation of the environment in collocated interactions is the processing of the data emanating from inhabitants. This data can be mapped to different parts of the environment. And the different mappings affect how inhabitants interact. I will illustrate and discuss the scalability of these collocated interactions with adaptive environments, before speculating on potential application areas.

Stuart Reeves - Some Conversational Challenges of Talking with Machines

A surge of interest in the capabilities of so-called ‘conversational’ technologies—both from research and industrial contexts—furnishes CSCW and HCI with opportunities to enrich and leverage its historic connection to conversation analysis (and relatedly, ethnomethodology) in novel ways. This paper explores a number of preliminary interactional troubles one might encounter when ‘talking to’ conversational agents, and in doing so sketches out possible routes forward in the empirical study of agents as collaborative technologies, as well as touching on further conceptual challenges that face research in this area.