The emergence of ubiquitous computing as a new design paradigm poses significant challenges for HCI and interaction design. Traditionally, human-computer interaction has taken place within a constrained and well-understood domain of experience – single users sitting at desks and interacting with conventionally-designed computers employing screens, keyboards and mice for interaction. New opportu...

Computer science provides an in-depth understanding of technical aspects of programming concepts, but if we want to understand how programming concepts evolve, how programmers think and talk about them and how they are used in practice, we need to consider a broader perspective that includes historical, philosophical and cognitive aspects. In this paper, we develop such broader understanding of...

Emotions are a fundamental part of our living experience, yet our grasp on what they are and how to study them is still tenuous. Cell editor Mirna Kvajo talked with Joe LeDoux, Cristina Alberini, and Liz Phelps about the challenges in researching emotions and whether studies in animals can teach us about them. An excerpt of the conversation appears below, and the full conversation is available ...

You see, this happened a few months ago, but it's still going on right now, and it ought to make us feel ashamed when we talk like we know what we're talking about when we talk about love.

Novelty and diversity are functions of three things: a system’s performance at ad-hoc retrieval, its ability to order documents diversely, and the collection over which the system is run. Ideally, our diversity evaluation framework (test collections and evaluation measures) would sort systems by their skill at ordering documents. Unfortunately, the current framework as exemplified by TREC is ac...