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Rafael "Tico" Ballagas
User Experience Researcher
Palo Alto, CA
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Tico is a Senior Research Scientist and Designer in the IDEA team at Nokia Research Center, Palo Alto. His research is focused on applying human-centered iterative design processes to ubiquitous computing. He is interested in rapid prototyping tools, evaluation methods, and most importantly building novel ubiquitous computing applications and services that address real human needs. Tico has been working in the mobile industry since 1997, originally as a member of the development team of Motorola's PageWriter 2000 -- the world's first two-way pager -- which has been ranked #13 on PC World's "The 50 Greatest Gadgets of the past 50 Years".

He earned his Doctorate in computer science at RWTH Aachen University in Germany with a focus on designing, prototyping, and evaluating ubiquitous computing applications and interaction techniques.  During his PhD he deployed REXplorer, a pervasive game for tourists in Regensburg, Germany.  He completed his B.S. with highest honors in electrical engineering from Georgia Tech, and M.S. from Stanford University

 

Research Interests

Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Ubiquitous Computing, Rapid Prototyping Tools, Pervasive Games, Computers in Entertainment, Novel Input Technologies, Multi-modal interfaces
 

Research Projects

Family Communication (Storyplay)

 

Supporting/Other Information

Press:  

 

 

Publications

A. Puikkonen, J. Häkkilä, R. Ballagas, and J. Mäntyjärvi. Practices in creating videos with mobile phones. In MobileHCI ’09: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services, pages 1–10, New York, NY, USA, 2009. ACM. 

A. Puikkonen, J. Häkkiä, R. Ballagas, and J. Mäntyärvi. Feature use in mobile video creation. In INTERACT ’09: Proceedings of the 12th IFIP TC 13 International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, pages 866–869, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2009. Springer-Verlag. 

S. Kratz and R. Ballagas. Unravelling Seams: Improving Mobile Gesture Recognition with Visual Feedback Techniques. In CHI ’09: Proceedings of the ACM CHI 2009 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. (Best Paper Award Nominee), ACM, 2009.

R. Ballagas and S. P. Walz. Rexplorer. In M. Montola, J. Stenros, and A. Waern, editors, Pervasive Games: Theory and Design, pages 215–218. Morgan Kaufmann, 2009. 

R. Ballagas, A. Kuntze, and S. P. Walz. Gaming Tourism: Lessons from Evaluating REXplorer, a Pervasive Game for Tourists. In Pervasive ’08: To appear in Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Pervasive Computing. LNCS, Springer, 2008.

Rafael Ballagas and Steffen Walz. REXplorer: Using iterative design techniques for pervasive games. In Carsten Magerkurth and Carsten Röcker, editors, Pervasive Gaming Applications - A Reader for Pervasive Gaming Research, volume 2. Shaker Verlag, 2007.

R. Ballagas, M. Rohs, J. Sheridan, and J. Borchers. The design space of ubiquitous mobile input. In J. Lumsden, editor, Handbook of Research on User Interface Design and Evaluation for Mobile Technologies. IGI Global, Hershey, PA, USA, 2008.

Sven Kratz and Rafael Ballagas. Gesture Recognition Using Motion Estimation on Mobile Phones. In PERMID '07. 3rd Intl. Workshop on Pervasive Mobile Interaction Devices at Pervasive 2007., 2007.

Rafael Ballagas, Steffen P. Walz, Sven Kratz, Claudia Fuhr, Eugen Yu, Martin Tann, Jan Borchers, and Ludger Hovestadt. REXplorer: A Mobile, Pervasive Spell-Casting Game for Tourists. In CHI '07: Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pages 1929-1934, New York, NY, USA, 2007. ACM Press.

Rafael Ballagas, Faraz Memon, Rene Reiners, and Jan Borchers. iStuff Mobile: Rapidly Prototyping New Mobile Phone Interfaces for Ubiquitous Computing. In CHI '07: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pages 1107-1116, New York, NY, USA, 2007. ACM Press.

R. Ballagas and S. P. Walz. REXplorer: A pervasive game for tourists. In F. Von Borries, S. Walz, M. Bottger, D. Davidson, H. Kelley, and J. Kücklich, editors, Space Time Play: Computer Games, Architecture and Urbanism: the Next Level, pages 366–367. Birkhauser Boston, 2007. 

Steffen P. Walz, Rafael Ballagas, Jan Borchers, Joel Mendoza, Sven Kratz, Christoph Wartmann, Claudia Fuhr, Martin J. Tann, Dong Youn Shin, Bilal Hameed, Laszlo Bardos, and Ludger Hovestadt. Cell Spell-Casting: Designing a Locative and Gesture Recognition Multiplayer Smartphone Game for Tourists. In Proc. PERGAMES, Third International Workshop on Pervasive Gaming Applications at PERVASIVE 2006, Dublin, Ireland, May 2006. LNCS.

Rafael Ballagas, Faraz Memon, Rene Reiners, and Jan Borchers. iStuff Mobile: prototyping interactions for mobile phones in interactive spaces. In Proc. PERMID, Workshop on Pervasive Mobile Interaction Devices at PERVASIVE 2006, Dublin, Ireland, 2006. LNCS.

Rafael Ballagas, Steffen Walz, and Jan Borchers. REXplorer: A Pervasive Spell-Casting Game for Tourists as Social Software. In CHI 2006 Workshop on Mobile Social Software (MoSoSo), April 2006.

Rafael Ballagas, Michael Rohs, Jennifer Sheridan, and Jan Borchers. The Smart Phone: A Ubiquitous Input Device. IEEE Pervasive Computing, 5(1):70-77, Jan-Mar 2006. .

Trevor Pering, Rafael Ballagas, and Roy Want. Spontaneous marriages of mobile devices and interactive spaces. Commun. ACM, 48(9):53-59, 2005.

Rafael Ballagas and Jan Borchers. REXplorer: A mobile, pervasive game for tourists. In ECSCW Workshop on Computer Games & CSCW, September 2005.

Rafael Ballagas, Michael Rohs, and Jennifer Sheridan. Mobile Phones as Pointing Devices. In Pervasive 2005 Workshop on Pervasive Mobile Interaction Devices (PERMID), Munich, Germany, May 2005.

Rafael Ballagas, Michael Rohs, Jennifer Sheridan, and Jan Borchers. Sweep and Point & Shoot: Phonecam-Based Interactions for Large Public Displays. In CHI '05: CHI '05 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems, pages 1200-1203, New York, NY, USA, April 2005. ACM Press.

Rafael Ballagas. Patch Panel: Distributed I/O Management for Ubicomp. In UBICOMP Doctoral Colloquium, Nottingham, UK, September 2004.

Rafael Ballagas, Andy Szybalski, and Armando Fox. Patch Panel: Enabling Control-Flow Interoperability in Ubicomp Environments. In PerCom 2004 Second IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications, Orlando, Florida, USA, March 2004.

Brian Lee, Rafael Ballagas, and Maureen Stone. Designing for Latency: In Search of the Balance Between System Flexibility and Responsiveness. In Ubicomp 2003, Seattle, Washington, USA, October 2003. Workshop position paper for ''At the Crossroads: The Interaction of HCI and Systems Issues in UbiComp''

Rafael Ballagas, Meredith Ringel, Maureen Stone, and Jan Borchers. iStuff: A Physical User Interface Toolkit for Ubiquitous Computing Environments. In Proceedings of the ACM CHI 2003 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pages 537-544, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, USA, April 2003.


Meredith Ringel, Joshua Tyler, Maureen Stone, Rafael Ballagas, and Jan Borchers. iStuff: A Scalable Architecture for Lightweight, Wireless Devices for Ubicomp User Interfaces. In Ubicomp 2002, September 2002.

Jan Borchers, Rafael Ballagas, and Maureen Stone. iStuff: Searching for the Great Unified Input Theory. In UBICOMP 2002: Ubiquitous Computing, September 2002.

 
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