Interactions - November/December 2012

Novel Taste Interaction: Adding Electric Taste to Foods and Drinks We have developed devices for eating that can add electric taste to foods and drinks. These apparatuses enable us to instantly add, enhance, and delete certain flavors. With the help of these devices, we are able to enhance healthy low-salt meals, share flavors via You Tube, and detect whether or not someone is eating just by checking the change in the electric current.

Project website: http://apapababy.com/electrictaste/

Publication: Nakamura, H. and Miyashita, H. Development and evaluation of interactive system for synchronizing electric taste and visual content. Proc. of CHI 2012. ACM, New York, 517-520.

Hiromi Nakamura | Meiji University | hirominakamura.b@gmail.com Homei Miyashita | Meiji University | homei@isc.meiji.ac.jp

or even tasting Research Demos and art and design Explorations that cross-pollinate
cultural and technologically driven thinking.

Umati: The Crowdsourcing Vending Machine Umati is a crowdsourcing vending machine. Instead of inserting money into the machine to pay for snacks, users complete crowdsourcing tasks on an integrated touchscreen. Umati allows us to target specific communities who don’t tradi- tionally participate in crowd work with tasks suited to their skills and knowl- edge. We also target these communities with rewards that suit them and in locations where they have cognitive surplus. We deployed Umati at UC Berkeley and found we were able to cheaply crowdsource the grading of computer science xams, a task that cannot be accomplished on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.

Project website: http://represent.berkeley.edu/umati/

Publication: Heimerl, K., Gawalt, B., Chen, K., Parikh, T., and Hartmann, B. Communitysourcing: Engaging local crowds to perform expert work via physical kiosks. Proc. of CHI 2012. ACM, New York, 2207-2210.