Last update Jan 2018.
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Leon Watts' Home Page
In Brief
I am a senior lecturer in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Bath.
My research spans two fields: Computer-Supported Collaborative Work and Human-Robot Interaction.
In both cases, I focus on the analysis and design of interactive systems as they serve to foster better understanding and joint action.
People and their feelings should be at the heart of interaction design challenges, no matter what the context of design may be.
I have researched political discussions, medical consultation, health and rehabilitation, historical interpretation,
and the coordination of work in physical settings. My intention is to create general, re-usable frameworks for designing
and evaluating interactive technologies intended to bring people, and other agencies, together.
Technologically mediated interactions frame 'social cognition'; how people perceive one another as social agents,
how social actions are interpreted,
and how social situations are understood.
Interactive systems can have this effect because they
ampilfy some aspects of human behaviour, hide others
and also open up new ways of acting that have no natural analogue.
So interactive systems impose themselves on human relationships
and have become a key part of human experience.
If they are to work well as media that support human understanding,
interactive systems must assist people to express themselves and
also help show whether or not they recognise the feelings of others.
All mediating technologies influence processes of mutual understanding and as a result our sense of belonging, our
capacity for reaching agreement, ability to offer help, tolerate disputes, and recognise concern.
Whilst some interactive technologies appear to be beneficial to people,
others seem prone to trip us up and thereby risk damage to relationships we care about.
For me, the key situations are those where emotions are at stake.
I think of these as 'difficult' conversations.
For example, when people have fallen out with one another and are angry or anxious,
they must work to express themselves, to understand one another, and to show that they are doing so.
Equally, when people love one another but must talk through technologies, they may struggle to find the right words for their relationship.
So whether the tone of a conversation is positive or negative, people must somehow convey their feelings in the all-too-often harsh light cast by mediating technology.
In these circumstances, 'reading between the lines' really matters and poses very challenging problems for designers of interactive systems.
Since 2012, my research has also addressed communication in human-robot interaction, by considering the potential value of endowing robots with affective states.
'Affect' is anything to do with moods, emotions or sentiments.
To build an emotional robot, a computer scientist must find a workable scheme
for modelling and representing emotion in an embodied interactive virtual agent.
I primarily envisage artificial agents as artificially intelligent collaborators that indicate self-reflection through
emotional behaviours.
An analytical approach to the invention and study of mediating technologies can show how they cause problems and offer benefits to people.
Knowledge of this kind has implications for personal relationships, business
efficiency and democratic participation in the functioning of society.
It is also significant for
Robotics and Autonomous Systems
.
RAS demand consideration of how human and artificial agents might work together
as partners in joint activities.
I am also concerned with the science
base for research on people and ICTs. That means I conduct projects with
a methodological focus (finding new ways to find out new
things). I am equally interested in methods whether they are quantitative (using
numbers to describe and compare) or qualitative (using other
observational data, especially linguistic information).
ResearchGate
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Google Scholar
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University of Bath
Any academic is only as good as the wonderful people with whom they share ideas and build understanding.
I am fortunate to benefit in this way through my discussions and ongoing research with:
- Denise Lengyel - Research student looking at alternative interactive representational forms for difficult conversations.
- Zack Lyons - Research student at the Centre for Digital Entertainment
and co-supervised by Professor Nigel Harris, Director of Designability.
We are working with health professionals at the Brain Injury Rehabilitation Trust
to support meaningful therapeutic conversation in virtual worlds.
We focus on the potential of desiging interactive tasks in VR to assist in psychological rehabilitation of people with cognitive sequelae from acquired brain injuries.
-
Rob Sherman - research studentfunded by the South, West & Wales (Arts & Humanities) Doctoral Training Partnership,
jointly supervised by myself and Professor Kate Pullinger, Professor of Creative Writing and Digital Media at Digital Writing, Bath Spa University.
Rob is working on characterisation and interactive story-telling in digital fiction, Project Knole.
To develop his thinking about character, Rob is actively drawing on ideas about agency in Artificial Intelligence, and working in the domain of cultural heritage and ritual.
- Tom Wrigglesworth
- Research student at the Centre for Digital Entertainment
looking at engagement with historical information and cultural heritage, in association with
The American Air Museum, IWM, Duxford.
-
Bingjie Yu - Research student, doctoral studies examine the coordination of contributions
to public debate. She aims to discover how one might design effective systems for exchanging viewpoints.
Bingo's special focus is on identifying the interaction design challenges that must be met
in order to support public debate
as it surfaces in online discussions around dynamic media,
such as political video clips.
Dr Ryan Kelly
- Now at University of Melbourne Microsoft Research Centre for Social Natural User Interface Laboratory.
Formerly, research officer on Leverhulme Project
Investing Care and Appreciating Effort in Personal Communication Technologies
Dr Sylwia Hyniewska
- Now at The Bioimaging Research Centre, Institute of Physiology and Pathology of Hearing, Warsaw.
Formerly, University of Bath researcher on emotion perception modification (Department of Psychology) and on behaviour change (Department of Computer Science).
Specialises in affective computing and non-verbal emotional expression.
Dr Jekaterina Novikova -
Now at Heriot Watt Human-Robot Interaction Lab, working on natural language dialog; design and evaluation of emotionally expressive behaviour in Human-Robot Interaction.
I was the Research Ethics Officer for the Department of Computer Science between 2006 and 2011.
Some fields of CS research necessarily involve the participation
of members of the public for testing and evaluation.
It is this kind of research that must be scrutinised to ensure
that ethical standards are met,
as explained in a Times Higher Eduction article.
In such instances,
the research must be planned so that rights and safety of participants (and research officers)
are properly respected, and the activities they are asked to perform are properly explained.
Ethical considerations apply to
a wide range of institutional activity
within the University of Bath. As of the 1st of August 2013, the
Computer Science Departmental Research Ethics Officer role has passed to Professor Stephen Payne.
I was appointed as the first Research Ethics Officer for the
Department of Computer Science at Bath and devised a scheme to
guide thinking about ethical research practice for my colleagues and students at all levels of study.
I put together
a self-checking scheme
to help identify and
manage ethical issues that may arise in CS research
that involves public participation.
If you are a current member of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Bath who
is preparing a proposal for funded research, you can find
information about what you should do on the Departmental Intranet.
Teaching
My teaching revolves around the connection between conceiving, designing, constructing and evaluating software technologies:
software systems engineering and
human-computer interaction for undergrads
and collaborative systems for grad students.
The connection between my research and teaching is in understanding how to define and reason about systems which are made up of human and software components. Besides the 'headline work' of a particular human activity, for example defining a new taxation policy, people also have to do a lot of 'cooperation work' just to be able to understand, cooperate and integrate their separate viewpoints. Software can be designed to aid in both the headline and cooperation parts of the work of any group wants to do. In that way, the quality and nature of 'the group' changes from being purely about human action to being about an integrated human-computer action. It depends on combinations of human intelligence ('nondeterministic wetware') and computational intelligence ('deterministic software'), working as a unified sociotechnical system.
There are lots of ways to talk through computers but the most familiar of all is probably email.
Our everyday experience of email is one of mixed feelings.
Email and SMS can be great. The are fast, convenient, easy to refer to,
accessible from just about anywhere in the world.
Unfortunately, their use can also be awkward and unpleasant.
They can be too fast (replies can be sent too quickly), inconvenient
(casual remarks are brought back to haunt us as promises),
and has an unpredictable rhythm (batteries fail on a laptop, wireless
goes down, the message recipient doesn't reply when expected).
Converstations always take place for a reason. Sometimes we engage in
them for several reasons and sometimes the original reason is lost, or
rather superceded, as our conversations take new twists and turns. My research
considers
how groups of people collaborate with one another,
the way they articulate their understanding and concerns to one another,
especially their 'stories', and
depends upon knowledge of
the spaces they inhabit and how they maintain their identities.
Tone and Emotional Force
Possibly the hardest thing of all about email is to
judge the 'tone' of messages, or statements within messages.
It is hard to do this because we don't get to see, for example, the smiles or the frowns
that accompany the harsh black-and-white of text-on-screen.
Certainly, the loss of non-verbal signals is a part of the problem - even with the benefit of smilies ;-)
The interpretation of what is meant by any message relies on an understanding of the conversation
and also the relationship within which the conversation takes place.
The tone of the conversation gives us grounds for reading the tone of a message.
It is hard to work within an environment that relies on email conversations and still
stay in touch with the broader context of which they are a part.
To work through email is in some sense to be act in a world that is detatched.
Famously, an internal email memo, no doubt sent in haste and without reflection, read:
It's a good day to bury bad news.
This message was sent at a time when, outside of the rarefied atmosphere of that organisation,
and the ultra-rarefied atmosphere of email-in-haste, was absorbed in
the horror of the 'bad news' itself.
So what is this 'tone'? It is the emotional force of the message as it is read.
How often have you thought, when you have received an email: How Rude!. Or had an overly
terse reply to an email that you have sent, that makes you ask yourself: Was I so very
rude in what or how I wrote to them?
There seems to be more scope in text-based
communication for emotionally significant misunderstanding than when we speak on the phone
or meet for real. It's hard to manage, on occasion, the yawning spaces between words. These
occasions are nearly always when we have to deal with contentious matters.
People do this by searching among a set of possible interpretations (or simply jumping
for the first meaning that comes to mind). One way of thinking about
this is that
every message tells a story
and the interpretations we
are able to place on messages therefore depends upon the number of narratives
we are able to use to make sense of them.
Contention is hard to manage through computer media
My
research is intented to understand what these matters involve, how to recognise them, and how to better design communications media that can cope with them.
It builds on prior work on how groups of people work together by drawing on their
social and working environment, and by shaping their appearance and behaviour for others.
Mediation doesn't always mean that there are technologies standing between people and through which they therefore must communicate.
There is a much longer history of 'medium' taking human form. Mediation is necessary to resolve disputes between people
that have become so hostile or intractible that the parties can no longer communicate with one another effectively.
This kind of mediation - the introduction of a third-party to act as a broker - can itself take many forms and is
governed by a host of practice-based principles.
Dr Matt Billings and I research these principles to better understand:
- what makes conciliating mediation effective given that parties have real difficulty in communicating with one another?
- how the effects of computer-mediated communication might be described through a conciliating model?
- the limits and value of introducing digital media to human mediation?
Human-Robot Interaction or Human-Robot collaboration
It is not at all clear that people and robots could work together in a
manner that makes sense. However, it is is
possible that robots might make better sense
to people if they behaved in ways that correspond
to expectations about how another social agent might
behave. I am interested in exploring this idea
and am fortunate to be supervising Jekaterina Novikova towards this end. Jekaterina is researching how people and robots might socially coordinate their actions by recognizing and acting on signals of their internal state. This approach is informed by Clark's model of conversation as a joint project, developing a set of mutually acknowledged states about one another and the progress of a shared activity in a common environment. She is considering how the
concept of 'emotional state' might be translated into an architecture for robot action selection. She is co-supervised by
Dr Joanna Bryson,
who is interested action selection as an artificial
intelligence research problem, and in robot control architectures.
Presence and Empathic Communciation
Despite all the pitfalls of using CMC technologies, most people find them to be
useful - even invaluable - most of the time. More than this, some people
are unable to find value in communication other than through technologies.
For such people, often facing severe and disabling personal challenges,
CMC technologies like discussion groups and bulletin boards are something
of a life line. But why is this? Convenience is an important factor,
particularly when mobility is limited, but the ability to share
highly unusual experiences is probably a bigger factor. There are many
unanswered questions about the quality and value of interpersonal support
through specialist online communities.
Dr Daniel Gooch and I investigate social presence (the feeling of being emotionally close to another individual) and how to mediate this through communication technologies.
>Dr Ryan Kelly and I, advised by Dan Gooch, are examining how perceptions of effortfulness can influence caring and other indications of empathy.
We believe that it is important to consider how designs support the investment of care and the appreciation of effort in the use of personal communication technology. The Leverhulme Trust is funding us to examine this question.
Reasoning about Identity and Design of CMC Systems
Dr Ahmad J Reeves and I worked together 2004-2006 to define
An Identity-based Design Framework for Computer-Mediated Communication Systems.
This research brought together some insights from social psychological investigations to better understand:
- how identity makes people think about CMC technologies in everyday settings
- how the design of text-based CMC technologies might be improved to account for their practical concerns for managing their identity
The mission of The University of Bath
The
Charter of the University of Bath
was granted in 1966. It commits the University to:
the advancement of knowledge, the dissemination and extension of sciences and arts, the provision of
technological, liberal and professional education
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