Information Sharing and Emotion
I am currently planning an ethnographic study of information sharing in an emergency department which would include observations and interviews of medical personnel. This study has to major contributions. The first is what can we learn about emotion in information sharing. Research questions include how emotions enhance and hinder information sharing in both face-to-face and mediated collaborative environments, what needs to be understood about emotion in information sharing that is not being addressed in design of current collaborative systems, and what is being affected by existing collaboration technology. The second is how to study emotion in the field; implications for both researchers and practitioners. Research questions include what methods can be used in the field, what you can learn from each method, and how are methods different for gathering requirements as opposed to evaluation of system?

Multiple-view Geo-collaborative Visualizations to Build Common Ground
Building on prior research on common ground and teamwork, we use a theory-driven approach to inform the design of a geo-collaborative prototype and develop laboratory methods for evaluating how collaborative visualizations support teams in geo-spatial planning tasks.

AlwaysOn
Technology is creating a world that is closer together and less private.  What is the most extreme impact of that type of intrusion?  In this project, researchers are connected through an always-on voice connection, 24 hours a day.  We are looking at the changes that the subjects make in their own lives to become accustomed to this type of connection as well as the changes those around them make. 

GossipBot
In this project we are testing a networked agent that asks seemingly innocent questions of users and then passes along a modified form of that information, much like gossip.  We are interested in the changes in the social networks of those that interact with this mediator.  In essence, can technology add to positive social climate? As of December 2004, this project is still being finalized and tested.

Memory of the User Experience
The importance of Affective Computing and of emotions in cognitive processing has been growing in the HCI community. Steps have been made toward finding reliable sensing interfaces and unique environments that would be appropriate for affective machines. One issue that has not been dealt with is where do different emotional reactions occur during the user’s goal attainment. This study gathered users recalled instances of frustration from using various technologies and categorized those frustrating incidents with the User Action Framework, an adaptation of Norman’s seven stages of action for classifying usability problems. We found that many recalled frustrating incidents occurred while the user is in the Translation or Outcome phase and that most of those incidents where intrusive in the user’s cognitive flow.  Link below to subsequent publications.

TouchPad Sensing of Emotion
This study samples behavioral signals (touchPad pressure) as indicators of user affect. These measures of the user's state during application run-time would be a sounder indicator in addition to it being less intrusive and not detected by the user, event-elicited and in a real-world environment thus eliciting real, internal emotions from the user.  Link below to subsequent IEEE publication.

Easy Access
When I was working at Philips Research I was given the opportunity to help design and test some of their multi-modal entertainment systems for ambient environment. The link leads to Philips' research website which describes the Easy Access system more fully and under 'protoype' there is a picture of the system. I did a lot of usabilty testing of this system for research and other multimodal systems for pre-development at Philips.

User Action Framework - UAF
The User Action Framework (UAF) is a mostly hierarchical structured knowledge base of usability concepts and issues, used as the underlying foundation for a suite of usability engineering support tools. The tools are used to analyze an interaction design and associated usability problems and their causes in an interaction design. I worked on this project my senior year at Virginia Tech and continued after I graduated for 6 more months. I was responsible for a team of designers and programmers that built the explorer tool that is the link above. Through our work on the explorer we also contributed to changes in the overlying structure of the UAF.

Visual Programming Environments
This project involved exploring different concepts associated with visual programming environments to ascertain requirements for a new visual programming environment. It supported the development of an environment and framework to support novice programmers, particularly grade school science teachers. I was a junior/senior at Virginia Tech at the time and I was responsible for running user tests and post-interviews. If you have access to ACM Digital Library then the link is accessible.

Conference Publications

Carroll, J. M., Mentis, H. M., Convertino, G., Rosson, M. B., Ganoe, C. H., Sinha, H., & Zhao, D. (2007).  Prototyping collaborative geospatial emergency planning.  In the Proceedings of the 4th International ISCRAM Conference, Delft, the Netherlands. 

Foucault, B., Mentis, H. M., Sengers, P., & Welles, D. (2007).  Provoking Sociability.  Extended Abstractsof the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, San Jose, Ca.

Lacava, D. & Mentis, H. M. (2005). Beginning design without a user: Application of scenario-based design. Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (HCII), Las Vegas, NV.

Devlin, R. C. & Mentis, H. M. (2005). Advanced tracking and correlation algorithms: Applying GOTS algorithms in COTS systems. Proceedings of the Conference on Working Together: R&D Partnerships in Homeland Security, Boston, Ma.

Mentis, H. M. & Gay, G. K. (2003). User recalled occurrences of usability errors:  Implications on the user experience.  Extended Abstracts of the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Ft. Lauderdale, Fl.

Mentis, H. M. & Gay, G. K. (2002). Using touchPad pressure to detect negative affect.  Proceedings of the IEEE 4th International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces, Pittsburgh, Pa.

 

Book Chapters

Mentis, H (2007).  Memory of frustrating experiences. In D. Nahl & D. Bilal (Eds.) Information and Emotion.  Medford, NJ: Information Today.

Carroll, J. M. & Mentis, H. M. (2007). The useful interface experience: The role and transformation of usability. In H. N. J. Schifferstein & P. Hekkert (Eds.) Product Experience. 

 

Workshops

Peters, M., Mentis, H., Haynes, S., Saab, D., & Durrant, A. (2007).  Exploring design as a research activity.  In Extended Abstracts of the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, San Jose, Ca.

Hoffman, B., Mentis, H., Peters, M., Saab, D., Schweitzer, S., & Spielvogel, J. (2006). Exploring design as a research activity.  In Proceedings of the 5th ACM conference on Designing Interactive Systems, University Park, Pa. 

Mentis, H. M. (2005).  Insight into strong emotional experiences through memory. Presented at the CHI 2005 Workshop on Evaluating Affective Interfaces.

 

Invited Talk

Cornell SIGCHI Distinguished Lectureship Series – HCI in the Workplace, April 2004.

 

Other

Quesenbery, W. & Mentis, H. (2000). A profile of technical communicators in usability.  Usability Interface, 6(3) January 2000.