Jan Blom

Principal Researcher
Lausanne, Switzerland (EPFL campus)

Dr. Jan Blom, 36, is a mobile user experience professional with nearly ten years of experience of working at Nokia. Jan’s academic background is in Human-Computer Interaction; his doctorate thesis was concerned with psychological implications of personalised UIs. Jan's core expertise is product concept design, a multidisciplinary activity involving innovation of novel concepts based on empirically grounded user needs. A project managed by Jan typically includes one or more of the following elements: user research, design of the product concept based on empirically grounded user needs, UI design and usability testing, development of a high fidelity prototype, running a field trial to assess the utility of the technology, business development around the concept and eventual tech transfer of the product to the operating unit. Jan has worked on a variety of application domains, including location based services, social media, and health informatics.

In 2006-2009, Jan was based in India, ramping up a research lab for Nokia in Bangalore, titled India User Experiences. The lab was set up with the aim of discovering novel service opportunities for Nokia in India and in emerging markets in general. After successfully consolidating the direction for the lab, Jan relocated to Lausanne, Switzerland in 2009. In the spirit of open innovation, NRC-Lausanne is situated on the EPFL campus. Jan´s key research topic within the NRC-Lausanne setup is to investigate how sensor data can be translated to contextual user experiences.

Jan has presented in internationally recognised venues, such as Judge Business School as well as U. C. Berkeley. He has published widely in the HCI field and he features on nearly 30 patents and patent applications filed by Nokia. His paper on urban fear was nominated for the best paper award at CHI'10.http://research.nokia.com/locations/lausanne

Research Interests

Jan's current research interests are related to:

1) People centric sensing and data driven design

Increased sensing capabilities of mobile devices have given rise to a paradigm called people centric sensing. Such an agenda is about using sensors in mobile phones and other wireless devices to collect large quantities of continuous, longitudinal data for various types of behaviors. From the scientific point of view, this can lead to new types of approaches to studying social systems, such as social networks or organizations. In addition to the scientific value, people-centric sensing is also increasingly seen as an industry trend. The increased sensing capabilities of mobile devices, as well as the possibility of uploading data to servers in real-time fashion, are utilized in data driven, context aware services.

Lausanne Data Collection Campaign, a project run at NRC-Lausanne, forms the basis for Jan's research. Jan is currently engaged in a variety of research streams, including e.g.:

* Working with machine learning experts in terms of trying decipher how the mobile phone gets used within the population in various use contexts

* Designing data driven services, wherein patterns are extracted pertaining to the continuously collected personal data, and fed back to the users themselves, in the form of innovative visualisations, novel applications, etc.

2) Health informatics

While based in Bangalore, Jan's team created a technology titled HealthRadar, a mobile disease tracking solution for developing regions of the world. A long term field trial was run in a malaria infected area in rural India, in partnership with a local medical college as well as the state health officials. HealthRadar featured at Nokia World in 2009, attracting plenty of media attention.

After relocating to Lausanne, Jan initiated a project related to combining information about environmental data, such as pollution (as acquired through wireless sensor networks embedded in the public infrastructure of the city), and georoutines of individual users. Overall, Jan is interested in using the sensing capabilities of wireless devices to generate services that have the potential to contribute to psychological wellbeing of individuals in developed as well as developing regions of the world.

Research Projects

Examples of recent projects:

1) Lausanne Data Collection Campaign

Click here to access the Lausanne Data Collection Campaign official web page.

2) HealthRadar - disease tracking for developing regions of the world

HealthRadar was associated with the design, development and deployment of a mobile disease tracking system aimed at the public health system in India. In a trial lasting for approximately one year, mobile phones were used in primary health care centres (PHC's) in the state of Karnataka to input malaria cases. District surveillance officers and doctors used a mobile client to access near real-time disease trends across the 20 PHC's participating in the trial. Research was undertaken to compare the mobile based, experimental practice to the standard, paper based one.

HealthRadar was one of the key projects coming out of the India User Experiences in 2009. It featured at NokiaWorld 2009. The project accumulated plenty of publicity, including:

On the Nokia blog:
Conversations.nokia.com (http://conversations.nokia.com/2009/10/13/nokia-healthradar-chasing-disease-down)

Wired, UK:
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2009-11/11/the-way-we-live-next-social-apps-and-open-source-research.aspx

Index.hu, Hungary:
http://index.hu/tech/cellanaplo/2009/11/12/gazdagokat_orjit_szegenyeket_gyogyit_a_nokia/

Print:
Svenska Dagbladet, Sweden
SvD Näringsliv måndag 23 november 2009 "Ska stoppa spridningen av Malaria via mobilen"

Publications

Selected publications are presented below.

Edited books:

Karat, Clare-Marie; Blom, Jan O.; Karat, John (Eds.): Designing Personalized User Experiences in eCommerce. Human- Computer Interaction Series, Vol. 5., Springer, 2004.

Journal papers:

Blom, J., & Monk, A. (2003). Theory of personalisation of appearance: why people personalise their mobile phones and PCs. Human-Computer Interaction, 18 (3), pp 193-228.

Blom, J., Chipchase, J., Lehikoinen, J. (2005). Contextual and cultural challenges for user mobility research. Communications of ACM, 48 (7), pp. 37-41.

Oulasvirta, A., & Blom, J. (2008). Motivations in personalisation behaviour. Interacting with Computers, 20(1), pp 1-16.

Blom, J. (2009). M-serving Indian agriculture. i4d, 7(2), pp. 26-28.

Conference papers:

Blom J., (2000). Personalization - a taxonomy. Extended Abstracts of CHI'00 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, the Hague, Netherlands, pp 313-314.

Persson, P., Jung, Y., and Blom, J. (2005). DeDe: Design and Evaluation of a Context-Enhanced Mobile Messaging System. CHI’05 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp 351-360.

Persson, P., Blom, J., Jung, Y. (2005). DigiDress: A Field Trial of an Expressive Social Proximity Application. Ubicomp 2005, pp 195-212.

Seshagiri, S., Blom. J. (2010). Using Digital Media for Entertainment - The Other Side of the Digital Divide in India. HICSS’10.

Kiukkonen, N., Blom, J., Dousse, O., Gatica-Perez, D., Laurila, J. (2010). Towards rich mobile phone datasets: Lausanne data collection campaign. Proc. ACM Int. Conf. on Pervasive Services (ICPS), Berlin.

J. Blom, D. Gatica-Perez, and N. Kiukkonen (2011). People-Centric Mobile Sensing with a Pragmatic Twist: from Behavioral Data Points to Active User Involvement. Proc. Int. Conf. on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (MobileHCI), Stockholm.

T. Do, J. Blom, and D. Gatica-Perez. Smartphone Usage in the Wild (2011). A Large-Scale Study of Applications and Context. Proc. ACM Int. Conf. on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI).

Best Paper Nominations:

Blom, J., Viswanathan, D., Go, J., Spasojevic, M., Acharya, K., Ahonius, R. (2010). Fear and the city: role of mobile services in harnessing safety and security in urban use contexts. Proceedings of the CHI’10, 28th international conference on Human factors in computing systems.

Chittaranjan, G., Blom, J., and Gatica-Perez, D. (2011). Who's who with Big-Five: Analyzing and Classifying Personality. Proc. of the 15th annual International Symposium on Wearable Computers (ISWC), San Francisco.

Patents

2009/2010/2011/2012: 20+ patent applications that are not yet in the public domain

2009: Location based estimated time of harvest service

2007: Sharing timeblocks

2007: Social router: system to enable selection of routes based on relative current population density of streets

2006: Realtime content attributing method for groupware systems

2006: System and method to control ownership of content in which the user features, using smart phones

2005: Method for distinguishing between short-term and long-term proximity overlap duration of queried devices