After 20 years of research, it is unclear what role the tabletop should play in the home or workplace. Progress has been made towards hardware and software interfaces, connectivity with nearby devices, and understanding human behaviour on and around the table – yet, in practice tabletops see limited use. This workshop seeks to explore the development and use of tabletops from historical, technical, and social perspectives. Workshop goals include synthesizing opinion and experience from new and established researchers on future directions of tabletop research, and an open discussion of questions such as to what applications are tabletops best suited? and how can tabletops be better integrated into larger workflows and digital ecosystems

In this study, we interviewed players of daily fantasy sports to understand their information management and decision-making behaviors. Due to the rapid cycle of decision-making that is required to play daily fantasy sports, we found that participants engaged in sophisticated and complex methods of information compilation and evaluation, using a wide range of digital and analog tools to help them organize vast amounts of information in a short amount of time. We contribute an account of these practices along with suggestions on how to further improve daily fantasy sports products.

Many online videogames make use of characters controlled by both humans (avatar) and computers (agent) to facilitate game play. However, the level of agency a teammate shows potentially produces differing levels of social presence during play, which in turn may impact on the player experience. To better understand these effects, two experimental studies were conducted utilising cooperative multiplayer games (Left 4 Dead 2 and Rocket League). In addition, the effect of familiarity between players was considered. The trend across the two studies show that playing with another human is more enjoyable, and facilitates greater connection, cooperation, presence and positive mood than play with a computer agent. The implications for multiplayer game design is discussed

In-car exercises are a promising way to keep the inactive driver of future autonomous cars in good shape and alert of the situation around them. To explore how to implement exercises into the car context, we designed AutoGym, an in-car fitness program that translates frustrating traffic into a fun exertion game. To progress in the game, the players must anticipate changes to the traffic situation they are exposed to in the car and work-out against their prediction. In this paper, we present the conceptual design of AutoGym and report what we have learnt from an explorative user study with 28 participants. Furthermore, from the design process and the evaluation, we derived three strategies for implementing exertion games. We found that these strategies helped to conceptualize exertion games as a playful embodiment of the dynamics of driving and as such, can positively influence the experience of control, orientation and situational awareness i.e. experiential factors that can be crucial for facilitating future autonomous driving in a pleasurable and safe way.

Many children in the USA speak a language other than English in the home, yet the literacy learning mobile apps and games available do not reflect the country's growing number of bilingual children. Furthermore, to the authors' knowledge, none of these apps provide open-ended, constructionist literacy learning opportunities for young bilinguals. In response, we created Bilingual SpeechBlocks, a version of the constructionist literacy learning app SpeechBlocks, for young children who speak both Spanish and English. We discuss the design considerations and examine the affordances of this app when tested with bilingual children, in comparison to the original monolingual app. From our observations, this version of the app enables new modes of wordplay and engagement for bilingual children and their families. This work has implications for how open-ended designs can foster bilingual literacy learning by encouraging language differentiation through exploration and providing natural opportunities for family co-engagement.

High memory contention is generally agreed to be a worst-case scenario for concurrent data structures. There has been a significant amount of research effort spent investigating designs that minimize contention, and several programming techniques have been proposed to mitigate its effects. However, there are currently few architectural mechanisms to allow scaling contended data structures at high thread counts. In this article, we investigate hardware support for scalable contended data structures. We propose Lease/Release, a simple addition to standard directory-based MESI cache coherence protocols, allowing participants to lease memory, at the granularity of cache lines, by delaying coherence messages for a short, bounded period of time. Our analysis shows that Lease/Release can significantly reduce the overheads of contention for both non-blocking (lock-free) and lock-based data structure implementations while ensuring that no deadlocks are introduced. We validate Lease/Release empirically on the Graphite multiprocessor simulator on a range of data structures, including queue, stack, and priority queue implementations, as well as on transactional applications. Results show that Lease/Release consistently improves both throughput and energy usage, by up to 5x, both for lock-free and lock-based data structure designs.