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Mirjana Spasojevic

Director, IDEA Team

Background

I am the head of the Innovate Design Experience Animate (IDEA) team at NRC, Palo Alto. We focus on mobile user interfaces and user experiences, including services that accompany them. We are a group of designers, computer scientists, ethnographers, philosophers and engineers, and we work closely together throughout the development process.

My Story

How do you get to do what you are passionate about? Each person has their unique story. In the early 90s I started my career as a computer scientist, teaching database courses and later working on large-scale file, storage and distributed systems. But then my research career took an unexpected turn with several projects in the areas of mobile and ubiquitous systems. For a while my colleagues at HP labs and I worked hard at deploying a museum guidebook prototypes in real situations. Just think of the scenario: hundreds of kids in the Exploratorium museum on a rainy day and you are hoping that your technology will survive! These projects taught me the limitations of a purely technological perspective. I became passionate about user research, human-computer interaction, user experience and design and decided to retrain myself.

These days I like to think of users first and what they really need. I like to think of real people on the street as they go about their daily lives, technology serving them, as opposed to the other way around. I love working in multidisciplinary teams - combining the knowledge of many disciplines and our individual strengths to see the problem in a new light. And I love to work outside of the lab, in the real world where people are truly mobile.

I see my role at the Nokia Research Center in Palo Alto as a user research evangelist and passionate advocate for very human mobile experiences. I try to put to good use all the things I have  previously learned as a senior design researcher at Yahoo! Mobile business unit, a senior research scientist and project manager at HP Labs where I was part of the Cooltown program, as well earlier experiences from a startup called Transarc and as an assistant professor at Washington State University.

External Activities

Conference organizer and member of the program committees:

  • Pervasive 2010 - Program Committee co-Chair
  • HotMobile 2008 - General Chair
  • HotMobile 2007
  • Mobile and Ubiquitous User Experience, 2007
  • Pervasive Image Capture and Sharing (PICS), 2005 & 2006
  • Ubiquitous Computing Conference, 2005, 2006, 2009 
  • Pervasive Computing Conference, 2006
  • Pervasive User Interfaces for Mobile Interaction Devices (co-organizer of the workshop), 2005
  • Electronic Guidebook Forum (co-organizer of the workshop), 2002 & 2005
  • Mobile Data Management Conference (Industrial track), 2005
  • World Wide Web Conference (Applications track), 2005
  • Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications, 2004
  • USENIX Technical Conference , 1999 & 2002

Personal Information

I live in Palo Alto, very close to NRC, with my husband and our two daughters. I love that I can bike to work!

Publications

Recent Publications:

Hayes Raffle, Rafael Ballagas, Glenda Revelle, Koichi Mori, Hiroshi Horii, Chris Paretti, Mirjana Spasojevic. Pop Goes The Cell Phone: Asynchronous Messaging For Preschoolers IDC 2011 (forthcoming).

Hayes Raffle, Glenda Revelle, Koichi Mori, Rafael “Tico” Ballagas, Kyle Buza, Hiroshi Horii, Jofish Kaye, Kristin Cook, Natalie Freed, Janet Go, Mirjana Spasojevic. Hello, Is Grandma There? StoryVisit: Family Video Chat and Connected E-Books. CHI 2011.

Morgan Ames, Janet Go, Joseph 'Jofish' Kaye, Mirjana Spasojevic. Understanding Technology Chpoices and Values through Social Class.  Proceedings of CSCW 2011, ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work. ACM Press, March 2011

Rafael Ballagas, Hayes Raffle, Janet Go, Glenda Revelle, Joseph ‘Jofish’ Kaye, Morgan Ames, Hiroshi Horii, Koirchi Mori, Mirjana Spasojevic. Story Time for the 21st Century. IEEE Pervasive Computer Journal. Jyly-Spetember 2010.

Hayes Raffle, Rafael “Tico” Ballagas, Glenda Revelle, Hiroshi Horii, Sean Follmer, Janet Go, Emily Reardon, Koichi Mori, Christopher Paretti, Jofish Kaye, Mirjana Spasojevic. Family Story Play: Reading with Young Children (and Elmo) Over a Distance. CHI 2010.

Jan Blom, Divya Viswanathan, Janet Go, Mirjana Spasojevic, Karthikeya Acharya, Robert Ahonius. Fear and the City - Role of Mobile Services in Harnessing Safety and Security in Urban Use Contexts. CHI 2010.

Morgan Ames, Janet Go, Joseph 'Jofish' Kaye and Mirjana Spasojevic. Making Love in The Network Closet: The Benefits and Work of Family Videochat. CSCW 2010.

M. Ames, D. Eckles, M. Naaman, M. Spasojevic and N. Van House. Requirments for Mobile Photoware. Journal of Personal and Ubiquitous Computing. 2009.

Y. Xu, M. Spasojevic, J. Gao, M. Jacob. Designing a Vision-based Mobile Interface for In-store Shopping. NordiCHI 2008. 

G. Cuellar, D. Eckles, M. Spasojevic. Photos for Information: A Field Study of Cameraphone Computer Vision Interactions in Tourism. Proc. CHI 2008 Extended Abstracts. April 2008.

R. Hinman, M. Spasojevic, P. Isomursu. They call it “surfing” for a reason: Identifying mobile Internet needs through PC deprivation. Proc. of CHI 2008, Florence, Italy, April 2008.

P. Isomursu, R. Hinman, M. Isomursu, M. Spasojevic. Metaphors for the Mobile Internet. Journal on Knowledge, Technology & Policy, Dec 2007, Vol 20, No 4.

M. Spasojevic, R. Hinman, W. Dzierson. Mobile Persuasion Design Principles. Mobile Persuasion: 20 Perspectives on the Future of Behavior Change (Persuasive Technology Lab, BJ Fogg, D. Eckles, eds.)

M. Spasojevic, R. Hinman. Mobile Web: Design Insights from Consumer Field Studies. Mobile Persuasion Conference, Stanford, Feb 2nd, 2007. PDF

J. Gao, M. Spasojevic, M. Jacob, V. Setlur, E. Reponen, M. Pulkkinen, P. Schloter, K. Pulli. Intelligent Visual Matching for Providing Context-Aware Information to Mobile Users. Supplemental proceedings of the Ubicomp 2007.

M. Spasojevic, R. Hinman, M. Naaman, V. Roto, W. Dzierson. Mobile and Ubiquitous User Experience: Design Principles and Best Practices. Workshop proposal for Ubicomp 2007 conference, Innsbruck, Austria, Sept 2007. (workshop site)

Other Publications

M. Naaman, M. Spasojevic. Location and Photos – A Match Made in Heaven… or Hell? Proc of CHI Mobile Social Software Workshop, Apr 2006.

T. Kindberg, M. Spasojevic, R. Fleck, A. Sellen. The Ubiquitous Camera: An In-Depth Study of Camera Phone Use. IEEE Pervasive Computing, special issue on The Smart Phone, Apr-Jun 2005.

T. Kindberg, M. Spasojevic, R. Fleck, A. Sellen. I Saw This and Thought of You: Some Social Uses of Camera Phones. Proc. of CHI, Apr 2005.

A. Slayden, M. Spasojevic, M. Hans, M. Smith. DJammer: “Air-Scratching” and Freeing the DJ to Join the Party. Proc. of CHI, Apr 2005.

M. Spasojevic, N. Bhatti, L. Kontothanassis, S. Roy. Understanding the Impact of Diverse Streaming Workloads on End-User Quality of Service. Proc. Int. Workshop on Web Caching and Content Distribution. Sep 2005.

T. Kindberg, E. Tallyn, R. Rajani, M. Spasojevic. Active Photos. Proc. Designing Interactive Computing Systems 2004.

M. Fleck, M. Frid, T. Kindberg, E. O'Brian-Strain, R. Rajani, M. Spasojevic. From Informing to Remembering: Deploying a Ubiquitous System in an Interactive Science Museum. IEEE Pervasive Computing, Apr-June 2002.

T. Kindberg, J. Barton, J. Morgan, G. Becker, D. Caswell, P. Debaty, G. Gopal, M. Frid, V. Krishnan, H. Morris, J. Schettino, B. Serra, M. Spasojevic, "People, Places, Things: Web Presence for the Real World," Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications, Dec 2000. & MONET Vol. 7, No. 5 (October 2002).

G. Alvarez, E. Borowsky, S. Go, T. Romer, R. Becker-Szendy, R. Golding, A. Merchant, M. Spasojevic, A. Veitch, J. Wilkes. Minerva: An automated resource provisioning tool for large scale storage systems. ACM Transactions on Computer Systems 19(4): 483-518, Nov 2001.

M. Spasojevic, M. Satyanarayanan. An Empirical Study of a Wide-Area Distributed File System. ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, vol 14, no 2, May 1996.

M. Spasojevic, M. Bowman, A. Spector. Using Wide-Area File Systems Within the World-Wide Web, Second Int. WWW Conference, Oct 1994.