Author: Ian Li

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Personal Informatics in Practice: Enabling People to Capture, Manage and Control Information for Lifelong Goals

May 22, 2012

Debjanee Barua is PhD student of Computer Science in University of Sydney. She works in CHAI research group. She designs and develops software framework and user interfaces for Personal Informatics. Judy Kay is Professor of Computer Science at the University of Sydney. Her research is in technologies for human computer interaction, supporting personalisation, pervasive and…

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Personal Informatics in Practice: Deep Personalization

May 15, 2012

Bon Adriel Aseniero is currently a computer science undergraduate researcher at the University of Calgary under the supervision of Dr. Sheelagh Carpendale and Dr. Anthony Tang. He has an interest in Art and Aesthetic Design, while his research is mainly in Personal Informatics and Visual Analytics. I have used some applications in my phone that…

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Understanding Self-Efficacy and the Design of Personal Informatics Tools

May 8, 2012

Adrienne Andrew is a PhD candidate in Computer Science at the University of Washington. She is interested in studying how people use food diaries on mobile phones: what challenges “typically motivated” users have, balance between capturing less detailed yet still valuable food information, and identifying new ways to organize food databases to support a wider…

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Spark: Visualizing Physical Activity Using Abstract Ambient Art

May 1, 2012

Chloe Fan has been self-tracking since she was 14 years old and saw the first Harry Potter movie in theaters. She is currently a Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon’s Human Computer Interaction Institute. After finding her passion for data visualization and information design for self-tracking tools, she has decided to take a year off grad school…

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Thinking About Side Effects of Personal Informatics Systems

April 24, 2012

Victoria Schwanda Sosik is a PhD student in Information Science at Cornell University. She designs and evaluates technologies that support people towards goals of mental and physical wellbeing. She works with Dan Cosley in the Reimagination Lab.   Personal Informatics systems often deal in domains and utilize data that are just that: personal. These systems…

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Personal Informatics for Self-Regulated Learning

April 3, 2012

Ryan Muller is a PhD student at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. He researches principles for designing technology that stimulates our intrinsic drive for mastery-based learning. Although the internet has fundamentally changed the speed and the scale of accessing information, that change has not seen such an impact in traditional forms of education….

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ECO|Balance: Exploring Design Issues for Mobile Persuasion

March 20, 2012

This is a guest post by Dominikus Baur,  a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Calgary. Dominikus is interested in personal visualization – how to make the large amounts of personal data available online accessible to their creators through visualization. His previous projects focused on visualizing personal music listening histories. Our busy daily lifes often make…

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Using Personal Informatics to Motivate Physical Activity: Could We Be Doing It Wrong?

March 13, 2012

This is a guest post by Patrick Burns, who is a PhD candidate in the School of Computing and Information Systems at the University of Tasmania in Hobart, Australia. He is researching the use of technology to promote physical activity. His interests include ubiquitous and wearable computing and ambient displays. According to the World Health Organization…

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Personal Informatics In Practice: Reflection and Persuasion in Personal Informatics

March 6, 2012

This is a guest post by Sean Munson, a PhD candidate at the University of Michigan’s School of Information. Sean studies individual preferences and nudges, particular for encouraging people to read more diverse political news and helping them to live happier and healthier lives. Personal informatics is inherently tied to behavior: reported behavior, monitored behavior, and planned behavior. When people…

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Personal Informatics In Practice: A Cross-Platform Smartphone Brain Scanner

February 28, 2012

This is a guest post by Jakob Eg Larsen, an Associate Professor at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) at the Cognitive Systems Section where he heads the mobile informatics lab (milab). His research interests include human-computer interaction, personal informatics, and augmented cognition. Better understanding of the intricate relations between our brains and behaviors is…

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Notes from the CHI 2011 Workshop on Personal Informatics and HCI

May 24, 2011

Two weeks ago, several researchers and I organized a workshop at CHI 2011 on the intersection of human-computer interaction (HCI) and personal informatics. HCI is a field that studies the interaction between people and computers and develops tools and applications to improve that interaction. Self-tracking and reflecting on one’s personal data can be time-consuming and…

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Share Your Experience Tracking Your Resolutions

January 24, 2011

Misha Chellam had a great suggestion to create a form so people can share their experiences tracking their goals and resolutions. Here’s a form where you can share your experiences. Note that the data is publicly shared here. To help you start, Misha’s example was: My name is Misha, my goal is to be more…

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Resolutions and Self-Tracking

January 7, 2011

You probably made some resolutions for this new year. To help you meet your goals, give self-tracking a try. Self-tracking can help you view your progress, control your behavior, and understand problems that prevent you from reaching your goal.

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Self-Tracking Tools Review 4

November 23, 2010

In this review, I will discuss electricity monitors. Instead of describing the devices one-by-one, I looked at the features of a bunch of these devices using the considerations I wrote about in this article and grouped them into two groups: real-time and long-term. Electricity monitors that belong to the real-time group show users their electricity…

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Self-Tracking Tools Review 3

November 15, 2010

In this review, I will take the considerations that I wrote about in my last article to analyze some self-tracking tools. The considerations are: 1) What questions are the tool answering? 2) How is the data collected? and 3) How do you reflect on the data? I’m also adding a fourth consideration, data portability, as…

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Self-Tracking Tools Review 2

November 8, 2010

This is the second article of a series where I review several self-tracking tools. I will go on a little tangent this week. To make it clear what I look for in different tools, I will discuss the different aspects of self-tracking tools to consider when making a selection. These considerations are based on my…

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Self-Tracking Tools Review 1

November 1, 2010

This is the first part of a series in which I will review several self-tracking tools. For each tool, I will highlight the features of the tool to help you track and explore data about yourself. There are two goals for these reviews: 1) we want to help users find the right tools for them;…