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This paper explores how conceptions of societal impact are produced and performed during academic computer science research, by leveraging critical technical practice while building a digital agriculture networking platform. Our findings reveal how everyday practices of envisioning and building infrastructure require working across disciplinary and institutional seams, leading us as computer scientists to continuously reconceptualize the intended societal impact. By self-reflectively analyzing how we accrue resources for projects, produce research systems, write about them, and maintain alignments with stakeholders, we demonstrate that this seam work produces shifting simulacra of societal impact around which the system’s success is narrated. HCI researchers frequently suggest that technical systems’ impact could be improved by motivating computer scientists to consider impact in system-building. Our findings show that institutional and disciplinary structures significantly shape how computer scientists can enact societal impact in their work. This work suggests opportunities for structural interventions to shape the impact of computing systems. 

Augmented reality (AR) has been used to guide users in multi-step tasks, providing information about the current step (cueing) or future steps (precueing). However, existing work exploring cueing and precueing a series of rigid-body transformations requiring rotation has only examined one-degree-of-freedom (DoF) rotations alone or in conjunction with 3DoF translations. In contrast, we address sequential tasks involving 3DoF rotations and 3DoF translations. We built a testbed to compare two types of visualizations for cueing and precueing steps. In each step, a user picks up an object, rotates it in 3D while translating it in 3D, and deposits it in a target 6DoF pose. Action-based visualizations show the actions needed to carry out a step and goal-based visualizations show the desired end state of a step. We conducted a user study to evaluate these visualizations and the efficacy of precueing. Participants performed better with goal-based visualizations than with action-based visualizations, and most effectively with goal-based visualizations aligned with the Euler axis. However, only a few of our participants benefited from precues, most likely because of the cognitive load of 3D rotations. 

We present a prototype virtual reality user interface for robot teleoperation that supports high-level specification of 3D object positions and orientations in remote assembly tasks. Users interact with virtual replicas of task objects. They asynchronously assign multiple goals in the form of 6DoF destination poses without needing to be familiar with specific robots and their capabilities, and manage and monitor the execution of these goals. The user interface employs two different spatiotemporal visualizations for assigned goals: one represents all goals within the user’s workspace (Aggregated View), while the other depicts each goal within a separate world in miniature (Timeline View). We conducted a user study of the interface without the robot system to compare how these visualizations affect user efficiency and task load. The results show that while the Aggregated View helped the participants finish the task faster, the participants preferred the Timeline View. 

In virtual reality (VR) teleoperation and remote task guidance, a remote user may need to assign tasks to local technicians or robots at multiple sites. We are interested in scenarios where the user works with one site at a time, but must maintain awareness of the other sites for future intervention. We present an instrumented VR testbed for exploring how different spatial layouts of site representations impact user performance. In addition, we investigate ways of supporting the remote user in handling errors and interruptions from sites other than the one with which they are currently working, and switching between sites. We conducted a pilot study and explored how these factors affect user performance. 

Intermittent infrastructures are often described as infrastructures that are not always on or accessible. In the face of climate change, infrastructures are facing increased challenges regarding intermittency. As the LIMITS community shifts to investigating and designing transitional systems— computing systems centered around sustainability and climate justice—understanding intermittency and its relations to infrastructure is necessary. In this paper, I use the lens of intermittency to examine infrastructures across southeast Louisiana, where stronger and more frequent hurricanes, increased Clooding and coastal land loss can cause disruptions in infrastructures. Drawing on this case study and existing work in networking research, infrastructure studies, and the LIMITS community, I propose key dimensions to examine intermittency for future research within the LIMITS community. 

Climate change is impacting the maintenance and repair of last-mile internet connections. In this case study, I describe how telecommunication workers based in south Louisiana maintain ageing digital infrastructures that require cable pressurization, a method used to keep buried wires dry. This work is becoming more difficult due to stronger and more frequent hurricanes, an effect of climate change that is tied to this region’s history with extractive industries. Additionally, this maintenance work can come at the cost of being able to update these ageing infrastructures. I argue that maintaining infrastructures in this context is to keep artefacts functioning within an unstable landscape. Ensuring that internet services continue against the backdrop of climate change requires shifts in considering how networks are embedded in specific geographies in relational and material ways. 

We explore Spatial Augmented Reality (SAR) precues (predictive cues) for procedural tasks within and between workspaces and for visualizing multiple upcoming steps in advance. We designed precues based on several factors: cue type, color transparency, and multi-level (number of precues). Precues were evaluated in a procedural task requiring the user to press buttons in three surrounding workspaces. Participants performed fastest in conditions where tasks were linked with line cues with different levels of color transparency. Precue performance was also affected by whether the next task was in the same workspace or a different one. 

Many real-world factory tasks require human expertise and involvement for robot control. However, traditional robot operation requires that users undergo extensive and time-consuming robot-specific training to understand the specific constraints of each robot. We describe a user interface that supports a user in assigning and monitoring remote assembly tasks in Virtual Reality (VR) through high-level goal-based instructions rather than low-level direct control. Our user interface is part of a testbed in which a motion-planning algorithm determines, verifies, and executes robot-specific trajectories in simulation.