No abstract

We are developing a preventative health cell phone application that helps motivate teenage girls to exercise by exploiting their social desire to stay connected with their peers. We targeted girls because they are more likely to become less active throughout adolescence and are more likely to use dangerous techniques for losing weight. The intent of Chick Clique is to provide information at opportune times in order to modify the behaviors of girls and ultimately lead to improved health habits. Our study investigated how collecting, sharing and comparing personal fitness information impacts activity level and health awareness.

Researchers have an opportunity to develop assistive applications that empower people to change unhealthy habits through monitoring their behavior. Mobile applications can enhance self-monitoring by providing real-time feedback and employing persuasive technology. The projects presented demonstrate the potential of persuasive, assistive applications for both chronically ill and healthy individuals.

The Web has evolved much from when Arlitt and Williamson proposed the ten Web workload invariants more than a decade ago. Many diverse communities now depend on the Web in their day-to-day lives. A current knowledge of the invariants for the Web is useful for performance enhancement and for synthetic Web workload generation. Invariants can also serve as a useful tool for detecting anomaly and misuse, a new dimension of Web usage arising from the change in trust assumptions in the Internet in the recent years. Focusing on scientific Web servers, we revisit the Web server workload invariants and find that only three out of the ten invariants hold as-is. We investigate appropriate revisions to the invariants that do not hold and also propose three new invariants for scientific Web servers.

Creativity need not be a chance occurrence. The authors of this article believe there is a technology that facilitates creativity. It is a technology that can be learned and applied and managed. They describe the specific steps that they followed in helping a group of R&D professionals learn, apply, and manage the creative processes in the lab. It is a story of practical steps that dealt with the everyday realities of managing in a large corporation.