Mobile Audio Knowledge Sharing

Post-Doc: Ban Al-Ani, UC Irvine/BSICS

Student: Angelo Pioli, UC Irvine/BSICS

Advisor: André van der Hoek, UC Irvine/ISR

Abstract: Software support tools today are becoming more and more ubiquitous. These tools are designed to help reduce the complexity of software engineering activities and increase shared understanding. However, they often only target the sense of sight, by providing information visually (e.g. text, diagrams). Targeting another sense, like hearing, would provide a way to augment information presented in existing tools, help to provide more context about the activities the tools support making those activities more understandable. We propose enabling the user of these tools to manipulate audio files thereby allowing the user greater mobility as well as sharing their knowledge about the activity at hand. The proposed Mobile Audio Knowledge Sharing (MAKS) feature will be incorporated in to existing tools allowing the user to create and associate audio files to the representations these tools provide. These audio files can be played, downloaded, searched and shared by all stakeholders involved with the project. We plan to investigate the impact MAKS will have on collaborative work awareness, understanding the evolution of the work products, and cognitive load of developers by engaging the developers' sense of hearing.

Bio:

Dr. Ban Al-Ani is a Research Scientist in the Institute for Software Research (ISR) and a lecturer in the Department of Informatics of the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences both at the University of California, Irvine. Her primary research focus has been the requirements engineering discipline within software engineering. Dr. Al-Ani has also conducted research in software engineering expertise, distributed teams and more recently increasing the usability of software support tools by introducing sound.

Angelo Pioli is a third year undergraduate Informatics major at the University of California, Irvine. He is current research focuses on ways to augment software engineering tools by incorporating sound to its existing features. Other research interests for Angelo include human computer interaction and the environmental impact of computing