August 17, 2023
Dr. Jacob Biehl builds systems with human users in mind.
For Biehl, an associate professor with a dual appointment in the Department of Information Culture and Data Stewardship and the Department of Computer Science, technical rigor and the usability needs of the people operating a system are not separate considerations. They're two organizing principles to how he approaches his research. “Building and designing first-gen artifacts” is a feature that distinguishes his approach to human-computer interaction (HCI).
Biehl’s active research agenda includes two areas of inquiry, both informed by his interest in wedding HCI methods to the construction of large-scale systems.
The first focuses on what he calls “Internet of Things (IoT) empowerment.” As an example, Biehl described some of the problems around “smart buildings.” Smart buildings use automation to control aspects of their environment, such as heating and lighting, and are typically outfitted with sensors that collect data about how occupants of a space are using it. The issue is that, while building owners or administrators may have access to this data, most occupants of that space do not have any awareness of how that data is being collected and used.
“But I may want to use that data to better understand my own working habits.” Biehl said, “How do we allow people to access that data without letting people spy on each other? What’s the right way to make the data available? If you had a camera and a shared space, how (would) you visualize that data so people (could) understand information about the space, but then protect things that are more privacy sensitive?”
A second line of Biehl’s research also focuses on the power of computation to shape and remake spaces around us.
In this area, Biehl’s work focuses on applications of augmented reality (AR) within medicine. Working with colleagues in the Department of Neurological Surgery, Biehl has been developing AR for usage “in the operating theater.” He noted that during neurosurgery, surgeons use endoscopic cameras that are “on the ends of tubes.” When conducting endoscopic procedures, surgeons “are manipulating what they see on the monitor inside the patient.”
“The problem is they can’t see what they’re working on without mediation, meaning they can’t just look at them [with the naked eye],” Biehl said. “There’s lots of visual information available to the surgeon, but it’s off to one side.”
This collaboration has yielded “a few prototype systems for supporting neurosurgeons using endoscopic, skull base procedures.” Whereas operating theaters are typically outfitted with monitors that provide visual feedback on the procedure to surgeons, Biehl and his collaborators would like to replace such monitors with holograms. By turning everything in the operating theater into “an information surface,” the “ergonomic problem” posed by monitors is solved.
But, according to Biehl, this approach also presents new challenges, such as deciding how to provide users with control over the location of the information when it is no longer limited to aparticular surface, like the screen of a monitor. Biehl said this is another opportunity to consider just how consequential user-experience (UX) design decisions can be.
In Biehl’s view, the long-term impact of AR and virtual reality (VR) technologies is going to effect a “fundamental shift in computing.”
“There’s going to be hardly any space, hardly any activity that we do that isn’t going to be mediated by computation in some way.”
Students can learn some of the basic principles of UX design in his course “Interface Design Methodologies.” The course teaches students how to build and think about operating systems and data, as well as how that data is presented to users as they build user-interfaces.
“That course is really preparing students to become user experience engineers, to build user interfaces, to think critically about both the design and systems, computer science-y types of things,” Biehl said. “How do you build a user interface (UI)? One of the things that a lot of students don’t realize is that a UI is one of the more complicated pieces of code in an application you build. It’s the thing that is most multithreaded. It’s the thing that has links to all of the data across your application. It’s a thing where bugs are going to come out more prominently to your users.”
--Daniel Beresheim