Bio: Technology is transforming our everyday lives, how we think, interact and feel. I work at the intersection of Psychology and Computer Science. I study how technology is affecting fundamental aspects of our everyday lives, and use insights from Cognitive and Social Science to design new digital tools to support effective focus, memory, collaboration and to help manage personal information. My past research was funded by the EU, NSF, EPSRC (UK), Google and Microsoft. I currently have an NSF grant to research Technology Mediation for Emotion Regulation, and a Google grant looking at collaborative file sharing. I am Editor of Human Computer Interaction 1 of 2 top HCI journals. Recently I had the huge honour of being awarded a Lifetime Research Achievement Award from SIGCHI, the society of Human Computer Interaction professionals. I am also a Fellow of the Association of Computational Machinery (ACM).

To get a sense of my lab’s research here is a video of a keynote talk I gave at the Computer Human Interaction conference in Toronto. Here too is an oldish video of a talk at Google summarising work on lifelogging and human memory. Here’s another recent interview on KZSC where I talk about Digital Breakup, Technology Mediated Reflection (smartphone apps improve well-being by increased understanding of our emotions), and how our digital possessions reflect our personality. Here’s a link to a recent CV.

Recent projects

Download our free Echo app that supports self reflection to promote well-being:

Android

Iphone

Video of Echo

Improving mood by technology mediated reflection on prior memories. In Psychology of Well-Being.

Unplugged: Exploring the costs and benefits of constant connection. In Computers in Human Behavior.

Is technology compromising adaptive features of human memory? Long term deployment and evaluation of Echo. In Transactions in Computer Human Interaction.

meTime: an app for improving online focus, In CHI 16

When distance doesnt matter for collaboration, In CSCW 16

Search for digital information relies on different regions of the brain than navigation. In Nature Scientific Reports 2015.

Explanatory Video

Building a successful stress reduction app by adapting challenge and success In CHI 2015.

Changing bad habits by attending to emotions. In CHI 2015.

How does our file organisation reveal our personality? In CHI 2014

                 

How online communities evaluate success. in CHI 2014

What sorts of knowledge help promote effective design? In CHI 2014

How do people agree on how to organise shared files? In CHI 2014

Designing new forms of digital memento based on current uses of photos in the home. In IJHCS.

How online communities curate content using multiple social tools. In CSCW 2014

Retrieval of shared files:How well can we retrieve files from shared tools like Dropbox and Drive?

In JASIST

Echo: a mobile system that helps you remember and record your past to regulate your emotions. In CHI 2013. Best paper nominee

Video of Echo

Video presentation on Echo at the Conference on Computer Human Interaction (CHI 2013)

Video of Community Insights

Video

Massive number of press stories on breakup article here:

Socio-technical Lifelogging: Deriving design principles for a future proof digital past. Human Computer Interaction, 2012

A summary of a 4 year project on digital memorabilia

How real designers use Personas in CHI 2012

Evidence why filing email is a waste of time. In CHI 2011. If you file your email read it and weep!

A new Curation framework for Personal Information Management (PIM). Why the last 15 years focus on search could be misguided. In ARIST.

Collaboration Personas - a new approach to designing collaborative software. In CHI11.

MemoryLane an application for creating digital mementos In IJHCS

SnapTracks Spatial Ways to View Lifelogs In CHI10