Gnomes in the Park at CHI 2018
4 May 2018
CASA showcases our Internet of Things research in Montreal, Canada.

The IoT in the Park stream at CASA recently presented a poster in the Late Breaking Work section of the CHI 2018 conference in Montreal, Canada. The CHI conference is on “Computer, Human Interaction”, or in this case, human, gnome interaction as the title of the paper is, “Talking to GNOMEs: Exploring Privacy and Trust Around Internet of Things Devices in a Public Space”.

You can view a short video about the project here.
Talking to GNOMEs: Exploring Privacy and Trust Around Internet of Things Devices in a Public Space
Authors: Richard Milton, Boyana Buyuklieva, Duncan Hay, Andy Hudson-Smith and Steven Gray, all authors from the Bartlett Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis University College London WC1E 6BT.
CHI’18 Extended Abstracts, April 21–26, 2018, Montreal, QC, Canada ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-5621-3/18/04. https://doi.org/10.1145/3170427.3188481
Abstract
Privacy issues can be difficult for end-users to understand and are therefore a key concern for information-sharing systems. This paper describes a deployment of fifteen Bluetooth-beacon-enabled ‘creatures’ spread across London’s Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, which initiate conversations on mobile phones in their vicinity via push notifications. Playing on the common assumption that neutral public settings promote anonymity, users’ willingness to converse with personified chatbots is used as a proxy for understanding their inclination to share personal and potentially disclosing information. Each creature is linked to a conversational agent that asks for users’ memories and their responses are then shared with other creatures in the network. This paper presents the design of an interactive device used to test users’ awareness of how their information propagates to others.