To moderate oral presentations a chair must manage time, and communicate time parameters to speakers through a variety of means. But speakers often miss time cues, chairs cannot confirm their receipt, and the broken dialogue can be a sideshow for the audience. We developed HaNS, a wireless wrist-worn chair-speaker Haptic Notification System that delivers tactile cues for time-managing oral presentations, and performed field observations at university research seminars and two mid-sized academic conferences (input from 66 speakers, 21 chairs, and 65 audience members). Results indicate that HaNS can improve a user's awareness of time, facilitate chair-speaker coordination, and reduce distraction of speaker and audience through its private communication channel. Eliminating overruns will require improvement in speaker 'internal' control, which our results suggest HaNS can also support given practice. We conclude with design guidelines for both conference-deployed and personal timing tools, using touch or another notification modality.

Recent advances in artificial intelligence suggest that machines will soon be capable of communicating in ways previously considered out of their reach. For example, humans engage in sophisticated emotional communication through the language of touch. What technical capabilities would enable computers to do the same?As our group examines this question in the context of emotional touch between a person and a furry social robot, we require sensors designed to detect and recognize subtle, nuanced touches. To this end, we demonstrate a new type of sensor based on conductive fur, which is sensitive to movements unavailable to conventional pressure sensors. The sensor captures motion by measuring changing current as the fur's conductive threads connect and disconnect during touch interaction. We then use machine learning to classify gestures from this time series. An informal evaluation with seven participants found 82% recognition of a 3-gesture set, showing promise for this approach to gesture recognition, and opening a path to emotionally intelligent touch sensing.