Born: Edinburgh, 1972
BSc (Computer Science, Edinburgh), PhD (Sociology, Surrey)
Associate Professor, Department of Communication, UC San Diego

Dr. Barry Brown is an innovative interdisciplinary researcher who successfully combines the social and computing sciences.  In the last five years, in over 50 peer-reviewed publications (in top forums such as CHI, TOCHI, CSCW and UBICOMP), he has described how computing technology can be better designed using a social science perspective.

Dr Brown has pioneered the serious study of leisure and enjoyment,  examining existing leisure practice, new technologies for leisure, and trials of systems in use in real settings.  Studying a range of different leisure activities, such as video game playing, tourism and sport, he has applied sociological observations to developing these new technologies.  This has pioneered advances such as mixed-reality museum visiting, mobile collaborative tourism and augmented-reality video games.

He has also combined this research with professional duties, where over the last five years he has organised six international workshops, published two edited books, and served on the committee of four conferences, in particular the ACM CHI conference for two years, the premier conference in the field of human computer interaction (HCI).  Recently as a co-applicant his project “Habitable Cars”, was funded by the ESRC’s large grants program.

He is trained both as a computer scientist (BSc. Edinburgh) and a sociologist (PhD. Surrey).  His research draws on both, by understanding the details of ordinary practices and problems to apply innovative new technologies. While working at Hewlett-Packard’s research labs (from 1998-2001) he published one of the first investigations of internet music sharing, and developed technology that support these activities in new legal ways.  His recent edited collection published by Springer, summarises developments in that field, with many references to his own publications.

In 2001 Dr. Brown moved to the University of Glasgow, joining the newly formed EPSRC Equator IRC (Interdisciplinary Research Collaboration) as a research fellow.  There he has studied and designing for four different leisure pursuits:

1. Computer games: Dr. Brown work on computer games has focused on the design of multiplayer online games, exploring the basic research question of what makes games enjoyable. This has contributed to the growing study of games as a site for computer science research (demonstrated by new ACM conferences such as ‘ACE’ - advances in computer entertainment).  In particular, his work has deepened the understanding of why the sociable aspects of games are playable, and the importance of ‘conversational resources’ in online social interactions.  Observations from this work have been developed in the form of two ubiquitous outdoor games. This work examined how games that take place on the city streets can also be sociable.  In most recent work, he has experiment with games which become a pervasive part of everyday life, played intermittently during other activities.  This is a particularly promising new genera for computer games.    
   

2. Mixed reality museum visiting: Dr. Brown’s work in museums combined studying museum settings with in-depth evaluation of a new type of museum visiting system. 

   

   The ‘Lighthouse’ system allowed visitors to share their visit with others over the internet, mixing the physical museum with a Virtual Reality model and web pages about the exhibits.  This system used a number of new technologies, such as ultrasonic positioning, mixed reality and wifi-based hand-held museum guides, pioneering their use in a realistic setting.  This was combined with a detailed sociological examination of that system in use. This described the opportunities for heterogeneous mixed-reality museums, which combine online and physical exhibits with online and physically present museum visitors.  In particular, this work highlighted the dangers of distracting visitors from the rich physical first-hand experience of visiting a museum.
   

3. Tourism: Developing the museum work further, Dr. Brown applied an ethnomethodological approach to examine what is involved in the popular leisure activity of tourism.  This involved studying at first hand what is involved in being a tourist, through travelled with tourists, observing and video recording their activities.  Rather than focusing on the ‘problem of tourism’, as is common in the social science literature, his work focused on the ‘problems of tourists’ - how they find suitable attractions and amenities, and how they share their visit with others.  A key finding of this work was the importance of the social nature of tourism, an area little addressed with current tourist technology.  These insights were developed technologically with the ‘George Square’ system, a mobile tourist system that allows city visitors to share their visit with distant virtual tourists over the internet.  This system allowed visitors to build up their own information about a city, using the history of where they went, the websites they consulted and the photographs they took.  This information was shared between actual city visitors and ‘virtual tourists’, supporting a real-time shared visit between those actually on holiday, and distant others.   In studies of this system in use Dr. Brown explored how technology can support or hinder the ‘division of leisure’ that takes place during tourist visits.
   

4. Television watching: Developing his earlier work on music sharing, Dr. Brown has recently updated his observations with a study of television watching, and the growth of video sharing on the Internet.  As with music listening, this work underlined the importance of collecting, and the inadequacy of current user interfaces for organising, collecting and watching video files.  In work in progress he is work on new technologies which would better support managing collections of video files, as well as the opportunities for enhancing the legal downloading of TV & films.
   

In addition, Dr. Brown’s work has also made a number of significant methodological contributions to the literature.  Leisure activities by their very nature mobile and fragmented - they take place in many different places, and in combination with other activities.  Through the use of video recordings of leisure, Dr. Brown has explored studying leisure ‘as it happen’, using repeated viewing in group analysis sessions to develop in-depth understandings.  An example of this is his work on maps use, where he published one of the first video studies of non-experimental, non-staged maps use.  This work has been published in geography, computer science and the sociology of tourism. These findings have been used in the redesign of electronic mapping systems, in particular how maps could be used for a form of ‘guided wandering’ rather than direct wayfinding. Dr. Brown has also extended the use of video in system trials, using visualisations of log data in combination with recordings of users. 

Along with his work on methods, Dr. Brown’s has made a number of theoretical contributions to the literature.  Through his work studying the use of mobile phones he has developed an approach to understanding how we ‘dwell with technology’ - our long term interactions and activities around technology.  This continues the work he started with the heavily cited ‘Wireless World’ edited volume, the first published collection that discussed mobile phones from both a social science and computer science direction.  His work has also discussed the interactions between geography and technology - in particular how spatial representations are used in making sense of the world, and the spatial characteristics of standardised computer systems.

In his work Dr. Brown’s has worked extensively with international  researchers in a range of different institutions, both industrial and academic.  He has been a visiting scholar at the University of Saskatoon, Canada at the Interactive Institute, Stockholm and the Digital World Research Centre at the University of Surrey. He has also co-published work with authors from these institutions, as well as researchers from the University of Queensland, Microsoft Research and HP labs.  Dr. Brown also maintain academic links with researchers at universities and research labs across the world, giving invited talks recently at Google’s headquarters in Palo Alto, Microsoft Research in Cambridge, the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Telecommunications in Paris, Intel Research Portland and Cornell University.  In 2004 he was a keynote speaker at the Socio-Technical Systems conference at Napier University in Edinburgh, and this year at the Virtual 2005 Conference in Stockholm.