[dcchairs2016] UbiComp/ISWC 2016 Doctoral School notification - #111

[dcchairs2016 at ubicomp.org]

Dear Jacob Kittley-Davies,

Please find enclosed the reviews for your submission for the Ubicomp/ISWC 2016 Doctoral School.

111: "Robotic Displays for Eco-feedback"

Despite not being able to accept your submission at this year's Ubicomp/ISWC Doctoral School, committee members provided guidance and feedback on your submitted paper. We highly encourage you to follow the valuable advices that the committee member entered in their reviews towards improving on your doctoral work.

Thank you for submitting to the UbiComp 2014 Doctoral School.


Max Mühlhäuser
Nadir Weibel
Rene Mayrhofer

UbiComp 2016 Doctoral School Chairs


------------------------ Submission 111, Review 1 ------------------------

Title: Robotic Displays for Eco-feedback


Confidence

   2  (Somewhat confident - I have passing knowledge)

Contribution to UbiComp

   This work suggest the use of robotic displays to improve energy saving
   behavior in buildings. It is clearly relevant to Ubicomp.

Overall Rating

   2  (Probably reject: I would argue for rejecting this paper.)

The Review

   There are two parts in this paper that I would like to address
   separately:

   a) The aim of increasing energy efficiency by changing behavior of
   building occupants is timely, in scope of Ubicomp (if that behavior
   change is facilitated by technology, that is), and has the potential of
   impact on the real world. However, it remains unclear if robotic displays
   are the best option to - technologically - increase energy efficiency in
   buildings. The author cites lighting as one of the main consumers of
   domestic energy (which I doubt - did that study take heating into
   account, including water and cooking?). If we follow this line of
   argument, then simple motion and occupancy sensors are often a
   significantly more effective approach to saving energy than trying to
   change the occupant's behavior. Experience shows that automating tasks
   that save energy have a stronger and more lasting effect than displaying
   data to get people to act, often against their usual routines. This is,
   admittedly, the devil's advocate question of the whole motivation for
   this research: Why not use better building design and automation
   technology to create more efficient buildings and let people just go
   about their daily routines as ever instead of trying to change behavior?
   With current buildings technology, it is perfectly possible to create
   plus-energy houses (with photovoltaic cells on the roof, and at least
   when considering the yearly average of consumption and production if
   electric energy, even including all heating uses). That is, the
   motivation may be outdated already (maybe not in practice, but at least
   in terms of technological capabilities).

   b) Orthogonal to the use case of energy savings, the research question of
   robotic displays potentially being more effective towards changing user
   behavior than normal displays remains an interesting one. This line of
   research seems very relevant to Ubicomp and remains worth following even
   if the question a) is not pursued further.

   However, I think that the author may be a bit too early in their PhD
   process to benefit fully from the Ubicomp DC, as this line of work still
   seems very much in an exploratory phase, and the specific research
   hypothesis do not yet seem clear. It is doubtful if the DC panel could
   provide specific guidance for next steps to help in the PhD thesis at
   this early stage. I would recommend to attend one year later, when first
   results already exist and more specific questions have been formulated.


------------------------ Submission 111, Review 2 ------------------------

Title: Robotic Displays for Eco-feedback


Confidence

   3  (Very confident - I am knowledgeable in the area)

Contribution to UbiComp

   marginal (robotic displays are taken as a given, not
   designed or put in a "closed" user-device-task loop as common for
   UbiComp research

Overall Rating

   3  (Maybe reject: I would agree with rejecting this paper.)

The Review

   The contribution is entitled "Robotic Displays for Eco-feedback” and,
   in the beginning, claims to address the question if robotic displays are
   better than ambient displays for making building occupants adapt
   (improve) energy saving behavior. 
   Three major issues make the paper appear to be below the threshold of
   acceptance for the UbiComp DC:
   1.	Lacking consistency and lack of coherent PhD plan
   2.	Doubtful claims and conclusions
   3.	Lacking pertinence for Ubicomp
   This critique will be further detailed below.

   1.	Lacking consistency and lack of coherent PhD plan: in the beginning,
   quite some space is lost with a verbose description of the need for
   energy saving etc. – the space lost seems to be lacking when it comes
   to providing the information requested in the call for papers (PhD plan,
   scientific methods, related work etc.); 
   lacking consistency further relates to: (a) "Focus-hopping" (e.g., for a
   large portion, eco feedback is not the issue addressed) (b) inadequate
   focus of related work (most of the related work is used to [pseudo-] back
   all sorts of *non-coherent* research questions, but not for showing the
   state of the art that the authors plans to exceed: what was achieved in
   the past that shall be outperformed?
   2.	Doubtful claims and conclusions: since many claims and issues are not
   related to concrete *effective* eco-feedback, they have little value; to
   cite two examples: 
   a.	Robotic displays are claimed to achieve better attention than ambient
   displays; this is ridiculously banal since ambient displays are
   deliberately meant to NOT raise much first-level attention; a much more
   valid question would be if (to put it a bit bluntly) the performance AND
   acceptance of a noisy, obtrusive, over time nerve-racking “waiving and
   gesticulating” robot leads to better *long-term* eco-behavior of
   building occupants than a non-obtrusive, gentle yet subconsciously active
   ambient display.
   b.	The “trust” associated with robots (in comparison to non-moving
   outputs) is hypothesized several times as a key (for eco-feedback and
   much more); all the literature cited for backing this point is centered
   around short-term interaction (such as following the robot in a rescue
   situation after probably a couple of minutes of acquaintance with it);
   what is worse, the hypothesis was also tested by the author with a rather
   short experiment (finding the center of a maze); however, there is vast
   evidence reported in the literature that humans trust mobile robots more
   than normal Computers because they tend to anthropomorphize them much
   more – often leading to way exceeding expectations that will sooner or
   later be disappointed, which again leads to dramatic loss of trust; of
   course, this process can be mitigated, but then the proposed research
   becomes an aweful lot more difficult, and “trust” is no more a simple
   anchor for major claims
   3.	Lacking pertinence for UbiComp: while the subject of robot displays is
   well slanted towards UbiComp research, the contribution evaluated here
   does not look at an ensemble of robot display, task-at-hand, and user
   with the aim to design and design and evaluate an eco-feedback system
   proper; rather, the research “picks” particular empirical issues
   w.r.t. how *users* interact with robotic displays; while UI guidelines
   that may emerge from such research may inform a UbiComp project, they are
   not at the very core of UbiComp; given the quite competitive
   submission:acceptance ratio possible, this third aspect must also be
   taken into account.

   Overall, the paper will probably have to be rejected since Ubicomp
   pertinence, clear Overall PhD plan with all major elements sufficiently
   explaned, and quality of the research altogether are required to be
   excellent in order to cross the high threshold of acceptance.