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Authors

Maribeth Back

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Maribeth Back

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Current place of employment:
FXPAL

Maribeth Back is a technology researcher and designer. She builds real-world, socially informed exploratory applications for new technologies. As a senior research scientist first at Xerox PARC and currently at the Fuji Xerox Palo Alto Laboratory (FXPAL), her research interests include collaboration in virtual environments, ubiquitous computing, multi-modal interface systems, and audio systems design and engineering. Back completed her doctorate at Harvard's Graduate School of Design in May 1996.

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Publications by Maribeth Back (bibliography)

» 2008 «

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Pickens, Jeremy, Golovchinsky, Gene, Shah, Chirag, Qvarfordt, Pernilla and Back, Maribeth (2008): Algorithmic mediation for collaborative exploratory search. In: Proceedings of the 31st Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval 2008. pp. 315-322. Available online

“We describe a new approach to information retrieval: algorithmic mediation for intentional, synchronous collaborative exploratory search. Using our system, two or more users with a common information need search together, simultaneously. The collaborative system provides tools, user interfaces and, most importantly, algorithmically-mediated retrieval to focus, enhance and augment the team's search and communication activities. Collaborative search outperformed post hoc merging of similarly instrumented single user runs. Algorithmic mediation improved both collaborative search (allowing a team of searchers to find relevant information more efficiently and effectively), and exploratory search (allowing the searchers to find relevant information that cannot be found while working individually).”

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Chiu, Patrick, Huang, Jeffrey, Back, Maribeth, Diakopoulos, Nicholas, Doherty, John, Polak, Wolfgang and Sun, Xiaohua (2008): mTable: browsing photos and videos on a tabletop system. In: El-Saddik, Abdulmotaleb, Vuong, Son, Griwodz, Carsten, Bimbo, Alberto Del, Candan, K. Selcuk and Jaimes, Alejandro (eds.) Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Multimedia 2008 October 26-31, 2008, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. pp. 1107-1108. Available online

» 2007 «

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Krumm, John, Anderson, Ken, Lea, Rodger, Blackstock, Michael, Spasojevic, Mirjana, Ito, Mizuko, House, Nancy A. Van, Koskinen, Ilpo, Kato, Fumitoshi, Back, Maribeth, Inagaki, Masatomi, Horikiri, Kazunori, Lahlou, Saadi, Ballagas, Rafael, Huang, Jeffrey, Lertsithichai, Surapong and Elliott, Ame (2007): UbiComp 2006 Workshops, Part 2. In IEEE Pervasive Computing, 6 (2) pp. 109-112

» 2006 «

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Harrison, Steven, Back, Maribeth and Tatar, Deborah (2006): "It's Just a Method!": a pedagogical experiment in interdisciplinary design. In: Proceedings of DIS06: Designing Interactive Systems: Processes, Practices, Methods, & Techniques 2006. pp. 261-270. Available online

“What does a student need to know to be a designer? Beyond a list of separate skills, what mindset does a student need to develop for designerly action now and into the future? In the excitement of the cognitive revolution, Simon proposed a way of thinking about design that promised to make it more manageable and cognitive: to think of design as a planning problem [11, 29]. Yet, as Suchman argued long ago [32], planning accounts may be applied to problems that are not at base accomplished by planning, to the detriment of design vision. This paper reports on a pedagogy that takes Suchman's criticism to heart and avoids dressing up design methods as more systematic and predictive than they in fact are. The idea is to teach design through exposure to not just one, but rather, many methods -- that is, sets of rules or behaviors that produce artifacts for further reflection and development. By introducing a large number of design methods, decoupled from theories, models or frameworks, we teach (a) important cross-methodological regularities in competence as a designer, (b) that the practice of design can itself be designed and (c) that method choice affects design outcomes. This provides a rich and productive notion of design particularly necessary for the world of pervasive and ubiquitous computing.”

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Sun, Xiaohua, Chiu, Patrick, Huang, Jeffrey, Back, Maribeth and Polak, Wolfgang (2006): Implicit brushing and target snapping: data exploration and sense-making on large displays. In: Celentano, Augusto (ed.) AVI 2006 - Proceedings of the working conference on Advanced visual interfaces May 23-26, 2006, Venezia, Italy. pp. 258-261. Available online

» 2005 «

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Matsumoto, Takashi, Dunnigan, Tony and Back, Maribeth (2005): Post-bit: embodied video contents on tiny stickies. In: Zhang, Hongjiang, Chua, Tat-Seng, Steinmetz, Ralf, Kankanhalli, Mohan S. and Wilcox, Lynn (eds.) Proceedings of the 13th ACM International Conference on Multimedia November 6-11, 2005, Singapore. pp. 263-264. Available online

» 2002 «

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Bellotti, Victoria, Back, Maribeth, Edwards, W. Keith, Grinter, Rebecca E., Henderson, Austin and Lopes, Cristina (2002): Making sense of sensing systems: five questions for designers and researchers. In: Terveen, Loren (ed.) Proceedings of the ACM CHI 2002 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Conference April 20-25, 2002, Minneapolis, Minnesota. pp. 415-422.

» 2001 «

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Back, Maribeth, Cohen, Jonathan, Gold, Rich, Harrison, Steve and Minneman, Scott (2001): Listen Reader: An Electronically Augmented Paper-Based Book. In: Beaudouin-Lafon, Michel and Jacob, Robert J. K. (eds.) Proceedings of the ACM CHI 2001 Human Factors in Computing Systems Conference March 31 - April 5, 2001, Seattle, Washington, USA. pp. 23-29. Available online

“While predictions abound that electronic books will supplant traditional paper-based books, many people bemoan the coming loss of the book as cultural artifact. In this project we deliberately keep the affordances of paper books while adding electronic augmentation. The Listen Reader combines the look and feel of a real book - a beautiful binding, paper pages and printed images and text - with the rich, evocative quality of a movie soundtrack. The book's multi-layered interactive soundtrack consists of music and sound effects. Electric field sensors located in the book binding sense the proximity of the reader's hands and control audio parameters, while RFID tags embedded in each page allow fast, robust page identification. Three different Listen Readers were built as part of a six-month museum exhibit, with more than 350,000 visitors. This paper discusses design, implementation, and lessons learned through the iterative design process, observation, and visitor interviews.”

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Harrison, Steve, Minneman, Scott, Back, Maribeth, Balsamo, Anne, Chow, Mark, Gold, Rich, Gorbet, Matt, Donald, Dale Mac, Ehrlich, Kate and Henderson, Austin (2001): Design: the what of XFR: eXperiments in the future of reading. In Interactions, 8 (3) pp. 21-30

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Back, Maribeth, Gold, Rich, Balsamo, Anne, Chow, Mark, Gorbet, Matthew G., Harrison, Steve R., MacDonald, Dale and Minneman, Scott L. (2001): Designing Innovative Reading Experiences for a Museum Exhibition. In IEEE Computer, 34 (1) pp. 80-87

» 2000 «

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Back, Maribeth and Cohen, Jonathan (2000): Page Detection using Embedded Tags. In: Ackerman, Mark S. and Edwards, Keith (eds.) Proceedings of the 13th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology November 06 - 08, 2000, San Diego, California, United States. pp. 159-160. Available online

» 1998 «

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Mynatt, Elizabeth D., Back, Maribeth, Want, Roy, Baer, Michael and Ellis, Jason B. (1998): Designing Audio Aura. In: Karat, Clare-Marie, Lund, Arnold, Coutaz, Joëlle and Karat, John (eds.) Proceedings of the ACM CHI 98 Human Factors in Computing Systems Conference April 18-23, 1998, Los Angeles, California. pp. 566-573. Available online

“In this paper, we describe the process behind the design of Audio Aura. The goal of Audio Aura is to provide serendipitous information, via background auditory cues, that is tied to people's physical actions in the workplace. We used scenarios to explore issues in serendipitous information such as privacy and work practice. Our sound design was guided by a number of strategies for creating peripheral sounds grouped in cohesive ecologies. Faced with an physical and software infrastructure under development in a laboratory distant from our sound studio, we prototyped different sonic landscapes in VRML worlds. In our infrastructure design, we made a number of trade-offs in our use of legacy systems and our client-server design.”

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» 1997 «

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Mynatt, Elizabeth D., Back, Maribeth, Want, Roy and Frederick, Ron (1997): Audio Aura: Light-Weight Audio Augmented Reality. In: Robertson, George G. and Schmandt, Chris (eds.) Proceedings of the 10th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology October 14 - 17, 1997, Banff, Alberta, Canada. pp. 211-212. Available online

“The physical world can be augmented with auditory cues allowing passive interaction by the user. By combining active badges, distributed systems, and wireless headphones, the movements of users through their workplace can trigger the transmission of auditory cues. These cues can summarize information about the activity of colleagues, notify the status of email or the start of a meeting, and remind of tasks such as retrieving a book at opportune times. We are currently experimenting with a prototype audio augmented reality system, Audio Aura, at Xerox PARC. The goal of this work is to create an aura of auditory information that mimics existing background, auditory awareness cues. We are prototyping sound designs for Audio Aura in VRML 2.0.”

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» 1995 «

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Hindus, Debby, Arons, Barry, Stifelman, Lisa, Gaver, Bill, Mynatt, Elizabeth D. and Back, Maribeth (1995): Designing Auditory Interactions for PDAs. In: Robertson, George G. (ed.) Proceedings of the 8th annual ACM symposium on User interface and software technology November 15 - 17, 1995, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. pp. 143-146. Available online

“This panel addresses issues in designing audio-based user interactions for small, personal computing devices, or PDAs. One issue is the nature of interacting with an auditory PDA and the interplay of affordances and form factors. Another issue is how both new and traditional metaphors and interaction concepts might be applied to auditory PDAs. The utility and design of nonspeech cues are discussed, as are the aesthetic issues of persona and narrative in designing sounds. Also discussed are commercially available sound and speech components and related hardware tradeoffs. Finally, the social implications of auditory interactions are explored, including privacy, fashion and novel social interactions.”

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Changes to this page (author)

23 Feb 2010: Enabled abstracts to be shown on Maribeth Back's author page.
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28 Apr 2003: Added the author to the bibliography

Publication statistics

Publication period:1995-2008
Publication count:14
Number of co-authors:56

Productive colleagues

Maribeth Back's 3 most productive colleagues in number of publications:

Elizabeth D. Mynatt:60
Rebecca E. Grinter:45
W. Keith Edwards:44

Collaboration count

Number of publications with 3 favourite co-authors:

Rich Gold:3
Elizabeth D. Mynatt:3
Jeffrey Huang:3

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Conference Calendar

Mar 21

WritersUA Conf. for Software User Assistance

Mar 22

Workshop on Pervasive healthcare in the home : Supporting patient motivation and engagement

Mar 22

UX People

Mar 16

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Maribeth Back

Publications by Maribeth Back (bibliography)

» 2008 «

» 2007 «

» 2006 «

» 2005 «

» 2002 «

» 2001 «

» 2000 «

» 1998 «

» 1997 «

» 1995 «

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Changes to this page (author)

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Conference Calendar

Eva Hornecker on Tangible Interaction

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