(Also see Mary Ellen Foster’s comments on this post below).

There have been very recent changes to how Wireless@SG registration works.  As reported in the conference handbook and earlier on the website, international phone numbers used to be accepted for registration — this is no longer the case.

Registration confirmation and password are sent via SMS; local Singapore mobile phone numbers are required at the moment. We advise you to purchase a prepaid SIM card upon arrival to Singapore. The prepaid SIM cards for all 3 mobile operators are sold in a number of shops including convenience stores like 7-Eleven. Passport is required to purchase a SIM card.  See the earlier post about hand phones for more information on obtaining a SIM card.

Since Norman’s book was first published in 1990, people’s notion of everyday things have grown to include more than just tangible objects. Every day, people interact with their operating systems, email clients, web browsers, search engines, web applications, games, etc. For these systems to function efficiently, users need to understand how to use them. Unfortunately, sometimes the same cognitive gap between user and designer becomes an obstacle. Consider searching for records in a digital library as an example. A 1998 survey indicated that a major usability problem with digital libraries is in finding the appropriate keywords for search [2]. In other words, users are having difficulty interacting with the search engine. Here and beyond digital libraries, the cognitive gap is often about translating user needs and/or tasks into keywords.

How can we close this cognitive gap? Perhaps we invite users to naturally express their needs and tasks in writing. Can we use NLP to understand them?

Powerset is a search engine whose goal is to “change the way people interact with technology by enabling computers to understand our language”. Since May 2008, Powerset provides users the ability to search and discover information in Wikipedia articles. Queries such as “When did earthquakes hit Tokyo” and “What are the ingredients in beer” are processed appropriately.

Jono DiCarlo presenting Ubiquity

Ubiquity from Mozilla Labs is another example where interactions on the web are centralized on the user and their needs and tasks, rather than around individual web sites. With Ubiquity, you control your web browser with language instructions. You can ask it to send an email of some text with a map and address of some location with just one sentence and one click. Without ubiquity, laborious cutting and pasting of text and images between various websites is needed.

There is still plenty of work to be done. Other kind of users need to be addressed, other interaction problems to be solved. Our job is only finished when the interaction with our systems becomes so transparent that users don’t even realize that our interface work-of-art is actually there. A rather ironic situation, but hopefully still content — with ourselves and our work.

[1] Norman, Donald A. The Design of Everyday Things. New York: Doubleday, 1990.
[2] Rousseau, G., Jamieson, B., Rogers, W., Mead S., & Sit, R. Assessing the usability of online library systems. Behavioral & Information Technology, Vol. 17, No. 5, pp. 274 – 281. 1998

Acknowledgment: Jono DiCarlo photo is taken by kbaird (licensed under Creative Commons).

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This article is contributed by Jesse P. Gozali. Jesse is a 3rd year PhD student under Dr. Kan Min-Yen at the National University of Singapore. His interests lie in multimedia and user interfaces. He is currently researching on photo organization with Dr. Hari Sundaram from Arizona State University and Dr. Ramesh Jain from UC Irvine.