Pressure input and thermal feedback are two under-researched aspects of touch in mobile human-computer interfaces. Pressure input could provide a wide, expressive range of continuous input for mobile devices. Thermal stimulation could provide an alternative means of conveying information non-visually. This thesis research investigated 1) how accurate pressure-based input on mobile devices could be when the user was walking and provided with only audio feedback and 2) what forms of thermal stimulation are both salient and comfortable and so could be used to design structured thermal feedback for conveying multi-dimensional information. The first experiment tested control of pressure on a mobile device when sitting and using audio feedback. Targeting accuracy was >= 85% when maintaining 4-6 levels of pressure across 3.5 Newtons, using only audio feedback and a Dwell selection technique. Two further experiments tested control of pressure-based input when walking and found accuracy was very high (>= 97%) even when walking and using only audio feedback, when using a rate-based input method. A fourth experiment tested how well each digit of one hand could apply pressure to a mobile phone individually and in combination with others. Each digit could apply pressure highly accurately, but not equally so, while some performed better in combination than alone. 2- or 3-digit combinations were more precise than 4- or 5-digit combinations. Experiment 5 compared one-handed, multi-digit pressure input using all 5 digits to traditional two-handed multitouch gestures for a combined zooming and rotating map task. Results showed comparable performance, with multitouch being ~1% more accurate but pressure input being ~0.5sec faster, overall. Two experiments, one when sitting indoors and one when walking indoors tested how salient and subjectively comfortable/intense various forms of thermal stimulation were. Faster or larger changes were more salient, faster to detect and less comfortable and cold changes were more salient and faster to detect than warm changes. The two final studies designed two-dimensional structured ‘thermal icons’ that could convey two pieces of information. When indoors, icons were correctly identified with 83% accuracy. When outdoors, accuracy dropped to 69% when sitting and 61% when walking. This thesis provides the first detailed study of how precisely pressure can be applied to mobile devices when walking and provided with audio feedback and the first systematic study of how to design thermal feedback for interaction with mobile devices in mobile environments.

Information processing applications driven by self-assembly and conformation dynamics of nucleic acids are possible. These underlying paradigms (self-assembly and conformation dynamics) are essential for natural information processors as illustrated by proteins. A key advantage in utilising nucleic acids as information processors is the availability of computational tools to support the design process. This provides us with a platform to develop an integrated environment in which an orchestration of molecular building blocks can be realised. Strict arbitrary control over the design of these computational nucleic acids is not feasible. The microphysical behaviour of these molecular materials must be taken into consideration during the design phase. This thesis investigated, to what extent the construction of molecular building blocks for a particular purpose is possible with the support of a software environment. In this work we developed a computational protocol that functions on a multi-molecular level, which enable us to directly incorporate the dynamic characteristics of nucleic acids molecules. To allow the implementation of this computational protocol, we developed a designer that able to solve the nucleic acids inverse prediction problem, not only in the multi-stable states level, but also include the interactions among molecules that occur in each meta-stable state. The realisation of our computational protocol are evaluated by generating computational nucleic acids units that resembles synthetic RNA devices that have been successfully implemented in the laboratory. Furthermore, we demonstrated the feasibility of the protocol to design various types of computational units. The accuracy and diversity of the generated candidates are significantly better than the best candidates produced by conventional designers. With the computational protocol, the design of nucleic acid information processor using a network of interconnecting nucleic acids is now feasible.

Cheap and easy to use eye tracking can be used to turn a common display into a gaze-contingent display: a system that can react to the user's gaze and adjust its content based on where an observer is looking. This can be used to enhance the rendering on screens based on perceptual insights and the knowledge about what is currently seen. This thesis investigates how GCDs can be used to support aspects of depth and colour perception. This thesis presents experiments that investigate the effects of simulated depth of field and chromatic aberration on depth perception. It also investigates how changing the colours surrounding the attended area can be used to influence the perceived colour and how this can be used to increase colour differentiation of colour and potentially increase the perceived gamut of the display. The presented investigations and empirical results lay the foundation for future investigations and development of gaze-contingent technologies, as well as for general applications of colour and depth perception. The results show that GCDs can be used to support the user in tasks that are related to visual perception. The presented techniques could be used to facilitate common tasks like distinguishing the depth of objects in virtual environments or discriminating similar colours in information visualisations.

Mixed reality games combine interactive digital content with real world environments, objects, and actors by utilizing a multitude of different sensors. While offering plenty of opportunities for designers, they are also notoriously difficult to design. This is in part due to them still being a relatively new form of gaming with only very few examples of commercially successful games. This means that the majority of aspiring designers lacks knowledge about the design space of these games – something that is crucial in order to create new and exciting experiences. While there exist several authoring tools to facilitate the development of mixed reality games, these tools do not provide guidance on the game design aspects. The design of mixed reality games is likewise bringing together experts from different domains (e.g. game design, technology, locales). In order to support this multifaceted and collaborative design process I have developed the Mixed Reality Game Cards. These are a deck of ideation cards that encapsulate the design space of mixed reality games in the form of physical playing cards. The cards can be used for rapid idea generation (i.e. creating a multitude of ideas from scratch in a short time) and in-depth idea development (i.e. further expanding and refining an idea). The Mixed Reality Game Cards consist of four types of cards to support idea generation as well as idea development. Opportunity Cards are the building blocks of an idea and describe potential elements of a design. Question Cards prompt the design group to consider the experience from different angles to refine the design. Challenge Cards surface typical design issues and problems that might occur. These domain-specific cards are supported by Theme Cards that are taken from the board game Dixit in order to provide additional domain-extrinsic sources of inspiration. I developed the Mixed Reality Game Cards iteratively over the course of seven studies following a Research through Design approach. This provided valuable insight into what makes ideation cards such powerful facilitators of collaborative design sessions. I identify content, appearance, and rules as crucial elements under direct control of an ideation card designer and tangible as well as playful interactions as dynamics that emerge during an ideation session. This thesis describes the development of the Mixed Reality Game Cards and uses the insights gained from this process to reflect on ideation cards as design tools in general, expanding our understanding of them.

The design of a parallel and distributed computing system is a very complicated task. It requires a detailed understanding of the design issues and of the theoretical and practical aspects of their solutions. Firstly, this thesis discusses in detail the major concepts and components required to make parallel and distributed computing a reality. A multithreaded and distributed framework capable of analysing the simulation data produced by a pedestrian simulation software was developed. Secondly, this thesis discusses the origins and fundamentals of Grid computing and the motivations for its use in High Energy Physics. Access to the data produced by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has to be provided for more than five thousand scientists all over the world. Users who run analysis jobs on the Grid do not necessarily have expertise in Grid computing. Simple, userfriendly and reliable monitoring of the analysis jobs is one of the key components of the operations of the distributed analysis; reliable monitoring is one of the crucial components of the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid for providing the functionality and performance that is required by the LHC experiments. The CMS Dashboard Task Monitoring and the CMS Dashboard Job Summary monitoring applications were developed to serve the needs of the CMS community.

This thesis provides insight into long-term factors of user behaviour with a Web site or application using low-level interaction events (such as mouse movement, and scroll action) as a proxy. Current laboratory studies employ scenarios where confounding variables can be controlled. Unfortunately, these scenarios are not naturalistic or ecologically valid. Existing remote alternatives fail to provide either the required granularity or the necessary naturalistic aspect. Without appropriate longitudinal approaches, the effects of long-term factors can only be analysed via cross-sectional studies, ignoring within-subject variability. Using a naturalistic remote interaction data capturing tool represents a key improvement and supports the analysis of longitudinal user interaction in the wild. Naturalistic low-level fine-grained Web interaction data (from URLs visited, to keystrokes and mouse movements) has been captured in the wild from publicly available working live sites for over 16 months. Different combinations of low-level indicators are characterised as micro behaviours to enable the analysis of interaction captured for extended periods of time. The extraction of micro behaviours provides an extensible technique to obtain meaning from long-term low-level interaction data. 18 thousand recurring users have been extracted and 53 million events have been analysed. A relation of users' interaction time with the site and their degree of familiarity has been found via a remote survey. This relation enables the use of users' active time with the site as a proxy for their degree of familiarity. Analysing the evolution of extracted micro behaviours enables an understanding of how users' interaction behaviour changes over time. The results demonstrate that monitoring micro behaviours offers a simple and easily extensible post hoc approach to understand how Web-based behaviour changes over time. Results of the analysis have identified key aspects from micro behaviours that are strongly correlated with users' degree of familiarity. In the case of users scrolling continuously for short periods of time, it has been found that the speed of the scroll increased as users' become more familiar with the Web site. Users have also been found to spend more time on the Web site without interacting with the mouse. Understanding long-term interaction factors such as familiarity supports the design of interfaces that accommodate users' interaction evolution. Combining found key aspects enables a prediction of a user's degree of familiarity without the need for continuous observation. The presented approach also allows for the validation of hypothesis on longitudinal user interaction behaviour factors.

This thesis bring together different disciplines – philosophy of mind, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, cybernetics and the performing arts – in a transdisciplinary investigation that raises new questions about the human mind and our relationship with computers and machines in a way that contributes to and helps elucidate the human computer interaction (HCI) debate. It chooses transdisciplinarity as the methodology best able to mobilize new ideas and generate a different approach to HCI, one that will develop fresh insights and produce critical ways of thinking about the problems of contemporary life in relation to our interaction with technologies (in the broadest sense of the term). The thesis reconciles the artificial with human nature by using transdisciplinary methods to reduce the friction between human beings and computers. It does this by revisiting early mechanical machines and automatons (from mythology and science), as well as exploring the subject in relation to elements of the performing arts. In the process, the thesis confronts the concepts of ‘artificial’ and ‘natural’ intelligence, and explores various models of mind and intelligence, as well as examining the physicality or materiality of artefacts in terms of their congruence with the paradigm of the ‘embodied mind’. The preliminary studies and literature review carried out for the research revealed that the model of the mind currently proposed by HCI as the basis for theories of how humans interact with computers is unsatisfactory, limited and very problematic, not least because it is a disembodied and representational conception of the human mind. In order to relieve HCI of this problematic issue, the thesis introduces the concept of the ‘embodied mind’, which brings a deeper understanding of how the mind works; its recognition that the human mind, body and the world are interrelated entities gives us a new insight into how we can improve our interactions with machines and computers. To achieve this, the research explores the conceptualization of human characteristics such as intelligence and cognition, and confirms 7 that these concepts are subject to change, manifested in different forms, distributed, situated and contextualized. Intelligence is not interpreted as a literal entity, as it is in cognitive psychology, or as a quality that belongs to or empowers human beings alone, but inspired by the philosophy of artificial intelligence (AI), the thesis argues that it is a manifestation that ‘emerges’ when favourable conditions facilitate interactions between agents and artefacts. Through a focused analysis and interpretation of early automatons, robots, and artificial and mechanical machines, the study explores the concept that technology is both a practice and an imaginative idea, and not just a concrete manifestation of a solution to human problems. It perceives automatons, especially ‘fraudulent’ automatons, as true archaeological discoveries, evidence of the fact that our human ambitions and ideas are not limited by the technological expressions of different eras; they represent a special repository of the desire to capitalize on and make such ideas manifest even when the technology for their materialization is not yet available. The thesis also brings ventriloquism and puppetry into the discussion, as both objects and performative practices, in order to highlight the human relationship with the material environment, as well as related aspects of human and non-human agency. This indicates that cybernetics could prove a useful framework for an understanding of elements of the relationship between the human and the artificial. The thesis therefore tackles the problems and limitations imposed by cognitive science, computer science and psychology, currently the main disciplines concerned with improving human relationships with computers and machines, but more specifically, it offers a more historically and philosophically informed contribution to the study of HCI.

The thesis describes how family life is organised in the car, with a particular focus on exploring the role and use of mobile technology in this setting. The objective of this research is to use the insights from video ethnographic data collected with families to discuss how social interaction between family members may be situated to technology use. Drawing from the notion of ‘ordinary work’ discussed in ethnomethodology and applying this to naturalistic video data of families in cars, the thesis demonstrates how family activities are locally produced, drawing on background knowledge and common-sense understandings of family members’ work. Using methods from conversation analysis, the research demonstrates how transcribed instances of talk can reveal how parents and children produce their actions and talk to jointly produce activities in relation to media use. The analysis presented in this thesis demonstrates how the family car provides an opportunity for parents and children to come together, and engage in mundane family activities of talk and play while using a range of mobile devices. The thesis draws on richly documented and closely analysed episodes of interaction to demonstrate how family life unfolds in the accomplishment of activities in which interactions are situated, orderly and observable. The production of family life within the car involves talk and embodied action that is artfully placed within interactions between parents, children and technology. The analysis elucidates how the features of negotiation, collaboration and coordination around device-use are placed alongside driving activities. The contributions of this thesis lie in providing a descriptive analysis of the social organisation of family life through technology, developing an understanding of family technology use in a mobile context and highlighting elements of interaction that will inform the development of insights for the design of technology that is sensitive to the nuances of family life, mobility and technology practices.

This thesis argues for an enactive embodied approach to understanding in- teractions with Adaptive Architecture. The growing interest in Ubiquitous and Pervasive Computing, including the current trends of wearable, sensor infused technology, shows the inevitable confluence of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Architecture. Specifi- cally, the availability of real-time physiological data allows environments to respond directly to the bodily behaviours of their users. This creates an in- teraction cycle or loop, which temporarily couples architectural environ- ment and human body. One instantiation of such an interaction loop are so called biofeedback environments, which reflect an inhabitant's physiological behaviour back to the inhabitant. Very few such environments exist, little empirical research has been done regarding their effects on inhabitants, and none have specifically engaged with, appropriated, and discussed the concept of enacted embodiment in this context so far, especially regarding multi-occupancy. To investigate enacted embodied interactions with adaptive environments I use a three-tiered, mixed-method approach. In an in-depth, quantitative study of an existing prototype (ExoBuilding) I first investigated the enacted control-relationship between environment and an individual inhabitant. I found that, by manipulating the control relationship between the biofeed- back environment and its occupant, the environment can actively influence the physiological behaviour of its inhabitant, which in this case was respira- tion rate. The reasons why participants changed their behaviour after having lost practical control over the interaction were found to either be a pre- cognitive bodily interaction with the environment or to be an intentional synchronising with the changing environment in order to maintain cognitive control of the situation. Secondly, these findings and interpretations lead to a research-based design of a new multi-inhabitant prototype environment allowing enacted embod- ied interactions between the inhabitants themselves and between them and the environment called WABI. While expandable, WABI currently envelopes two sections, each of which accommodates one inhabitant. Through further co-development of the software platform originally used for ExoBuilding, WABI can distribute biofeedback spatially to both its building sections in multiple ways. Thirdly, I investigated the effects of three feedback distribution modes on the two inhabitants of WABI in a qualitative exploratory study, which found that physiological synchrony is highest when the environment distributes real- time feedback such that participants are surrounded by their partner's phys- iology. I propose a model of triadic enacted embodiment that conceptualises the observed interactions between inhabitants and between them and WABI. This work makes three key contributions to HCI and Architecture. First, it provides empirical data to the limited existing knowledge of the effects of adaptive environments on their inhabitants. Specifically, it increases our un- derstanding of the control relationship between inhabitant and adaptive en- vironment. And for the first time it provides an insight into interpersonal physiological synchrony between inhabitants of adaptive environments. Sec- ondly, this work adds a new class of adaptive environment that enables shared biofeedback between its inhabitants. And thirdly, the previous two contributions expand the existing concepts of embodiment, which so far have ignored the bodily relationship between inhabitants and adaptive envi- ronments.

The growing requirements of a diversity of applications necessitate the deployment of large and powerful computing systems and failures in these systems may cause severe damage in every aspect from loss of human lives to world economy. However, current fault tolerance techniques cannot meet the increasing requirements for reliability. Thus new solutions are urgently needed and research on proactive schemes is one of the directions that may offer better efficiency. This thesis proposes a novel proactive failure management framework. Its goal is to reduce the failure penalties and improve fault tolerance efficiency in supercomputers when running complex applications. The proposed proactive scheme builds on two core components: failure prediction and proactive failure recovery. More specifically, the failure prediction component is based on the assessment of system events and employs semi-Markov models to capture the dependencies between failures and other events for the forecasting of forthcoming failures. Furthermore, a two-level failure prediction strategy is described that not only estimates the future failure occurrence but also identifies the specific failure categories. Based on the accurate failure forecasting, a prediction-based coordinated checkpoint mechanism is designed to construct extra checkpoints just before each predicted failure occurrence so that the wasted computational time can be significantly reduced. Moreover, a theoretical model has been developed to assess the proactive scheme that enables calculation of the overall wasted computational time.The prediction component has been applied to industrial data from the IBM BlueGene/L system. Results of the failure prediction component show a great improvement of the prediction accuracy in comparison with three other well-known prediction approaches, and also demonstrate that the semi-Markov based predictor, which has achieved the precision of 87.41% and the recall of 77.95%, performs better than other predictors.