Marshini’s paper “You’re Capped” Understanding the Effects of Broadband Caps on Broadband Use in the Home will be presented at the upcoming CHI conference in Austin, TX.

The study of how households in South Africa manage bandwidth caps showed that people have a hard time tracking their balance and understanding what or who is using up their bandwidth. This work informed the design of uCap, a tool to help households track, share, and manage bandwidth caps in their homes. A field study on uCap is planned for Summer 2012 – stay tuned for updates.

LiquidText, Inc. has been created to commercialize the LiquidText multitouch reading technology created by Craig Tashman’s as part of his dissertation research. The company will be bringing the technology to the iPad, and hopefully to other platforms in the future.

Gabriel will serve as co-chair of the UIST 2012 Student Innovation Contest, along with Julia Schwarz (CMU) and Kayur Patel (UW)! Gabriel competed in the UIST 2011 Student Innovation Contest in Santa Barbara CA with fellow GT grad students.

Marshini demo-ed the uCap system with Hyojoon Kim and Srikanth Sundaresan from the GTNoise group. The system was well received and many conference attendees were excited about monitoring and managing bandwidth in a more user friendly manner. Our lab is continuing to collaborate with GTNoise to develop uCap into a robust deployable system.

Two papers published on LiquidText at CHI 2011 in Vancouver. Learn more here

Our research on home networking is featured in the June, 2011 issue of Communications of the ACM, the flagship publication of the Association of Computing Machinery.

C. Tashman, W.K. Edwards, “LiquidText: A Flexible, Multitouch Environment to Support Active Reading.” In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computer Systems (CHI 2011). Vancouver, Canada. May 7-12, 2011

IBM Research has posted an article about the collaboration with Chris and Keith to build the Community Resource Messenger. We have been working with IBM since mid-2009 to develop the system which has been in the field since Feb 2010.

The Pixi Lab has been awarded a National Science Foundation Computing Research Infrastructure Award: CNS-1059350, “Collaborative Research: Measurement Infrastructure for Home Networks.” Keith Edwards (Co-PI), along with Nick Feamster (PI, Georgia Tech) and Ken Calvert (Co-PI, University of Kentucky), have received $545,357 to create and deploy a “home network data recorder” to collect a variety of home network metrics across the U.S., with the goal of informing both policy and technical research.

Keith has recently received $80,000 in unrestricted funds, plus in-kind hardware support, from Intel for support of Pixi Lab Home Networking Research. The project, “Understanding Current User Practices in Device-Rich Social Settings,” will explore end-user behavior in the home environment by monitoring aspects of home network usage.