Projects

The eLabBench is a tabletop system supporting experimental research in the biology laboratory. It allows biologists to organize their experiments around the notions of activities and resources, and seamlessly roam information between their office computer and the digital laboratory bench. At the bench biologists can pull digital resources, annotate them and interact with hybrid (tangible + digital) objects such as racks of test tubes.

Volunteer computing needs to engage and maintain participants in order to provide a good service. This project explored the potential of using awareness technologies as feedback mechanisms to mediate the relationship between an invisible infrastructure and its participants.

We studied the evolving work practices of biologists and the role of paper and electronic laboratory notebooks to support their individual and collaborative activity. In a participatory design approach, combined with longitudinal field we tested Prism, a hybrid lab notebook for biologists to capture, visualize and interact with streams of activity.

Prism provides an interactive access to cross-linked activity streams: hand-written notes on paper, type-written notes on-line, and key points (web sites, emails, analysis results) from users' computer activity, as well as web based activity.

We used Prism as an extensible technology probe that users could adapt to integrate additional streams and share information from other biologists. Our key findings include the notion of master documents, whether paper or electronic, and the importance of redundancy, which biologists use to make sense of their data. Prism provides a flexible, extensible tool that supports individual and collaborative reflection in creative work.

U-Note is an augmented teaching and learning system leveraging the advantages of paper while letting teachers and pupils benefit from the richness that digital media can bring to a lecture. U-Note is build on three modules. U-Teach captures the context of the class: audio recording, the whiteboard content, together with the Web pages, videos and slideshows displayed during the lesson. U-Study binds pupils’ paper notes (taken with an Anoto digital pen) with the data coming from U-Teach and lets pupils access the class materials at home, through their notebooks. Additionally, they can add their own comments and documents to their notebooks to extend their lecture notes. U-Move lets pupils browse lecture materials on their smartphone when they are not in front of a computer.

PageLinker

PageLinker is a browser extension that contextualises navigation by linking web pages together. The links between pages can be created implicitly through copy/paste events between webpages. Links can also be created manually by users who want to link specifically two pages.

PageLinker allows navigation through a network of related web pages without prior planning. By presenting links in context, PageLinker facilitates web page revisitation, is less prone to bookmark overload and is highly robust to changes which happen on the web.

Project web page

Navtracer

Navtracer is a Firefox extension that partially logs users' activity on the browser. It was developped for the evaluation of PageLinker.

Project web page