Meditation on a Cat Picture and a Flamingo Statue

I am a very visual person. As a student studying cinema, I’m interested in creating stories that can be woven together into a film. Even when something isn’t “supposed to” contain elements of narrative and fiction as defined by its medium, I do my very best to put them in there anyway. I want to make my own unique stories, in pictures and in words. Optimally, they end up being amusing.When making anything, I tend to hack a jagged path through the whole mess as fast as possible, and have something technically defined as a finished product as soon as I can. Then the real work can begin. I read or watch what I’ve put together more times than I can count, making changes, large or small, each time. When a piece is near done, it’s a family member I am dying to distance myself from. I have to take long breaks after making any work before I can survey it without it nagging me to consider switching the order of two shots, or to say “stupid” instead of “lacking of brains”. Whatever the work is, it usually ends up embodying my emotional state during the project, and contains themes and ideas that have recently been rolling around my head.My meditation on a flamingo statue is the most fun I have ever had writing something described as nonfiction. I researched as I wrote, and the research helped me gain momentum and interests in the themes I attempted to cover of real versus fake and a search for meaning and purpose. I have been a lifetime vegetarian, and this guided some of the pieces ideas as well as my research on salmon, unexpectedly teaching me that many of the salmon found at the supermarket could be another fish entirely, something interesting to learn and fun to play with thematically. The sculpture of melting flamingos I chose to marinate my thoughts over haunted me with a dark feeling of decay, which I attempted to portray throughout the piece. My goal in writing it was to build an uneasy adventure through imagination to bring my thoughts and feelings into a physical space and over a narrative arc instead of leaving them as just words on a page

PlayRightNow - Designing a media player experience for PlayNow arena

This paper discusses the process of designing a media player tailored for PlayNowTM arena with the purpose of enhancing the user experience of this media portal. The design process is divided into two main stages, the first consisting on gathering information to inform the design of a media player and the second stage involving a low-fidelity prototype of a media player. In the first stage, three main activities are carried out to inform the design of the interface: a literary review of relevant research and studies related to the way people use digital media and its effect on society; an evaluation of the interfaces and features offered by some of the existing popular media players in the market today from an interaction design point of view; and user observations and interviews on people’s relation to digital media. Based on the information and data collected from the first stage, an iterative process of design of interfaces was adapted, whereby potential users and design experts were consulted with their opinions and suggestions that influenced the sketching of various possible interfaces. Finally, a design of a media player for PlayNowTM arena is proposed, which is believed to have the potential of providing its users with a better experience in relation to digital content, as well as attracting new customers and increasing the revenue of this media portal

A Research Framework and Initial Study of Browser Security for the Visually Impaired

The growth of web-based malware and phishing attacks has catalyzed significant advances in the research and use of interstitial warning pages and modals by a browser prior to loading the content of a suspect site. These warnings commonly use visual cues to attract users\u27 attention, including specialized iconography, color, and an absence of buttons to communicate the importance of the scenario. While the efficacy of visual techniques has improved safety for sighted users, these techniques are unsuitable for blind and visually impaired users. This is likely not due to a lack of interest or technical capability by browser manufactures, where universal design is a core tenet of their engineering practices, but instead a reflection of the very real dearth of research literature to inform best practices, exacerbated by a deficit of clear methodologies for conducting studies with this population. Indeed, the challenges are manifold. In this paper, we present the results of our study analyzing the experiences of the visually impaired with browser security warnings, detail the development and advancement of the methodological best practices when conducting a study of this kind, and ultimately identify some initial approaches that could improve the security for this population

Providing effective memory retrieval cues through automatic structuring and augmentation of a lifelog of images

Lifelogging is an area of research which is concerned with the capture of many aspects of an individual's life digitally, and within this rapidly emerging field is the significant challenge of managing images passively captured by an individual of their daily life. Possible applications vary from helping those with neurodegenerative conditions recall events from memory, to the maintenance and augmentation of extensive image collections of a tourist's trips. However, a large lifelog of images can quickly amass, with an average of 700,000 images captured each year, using a device such as the SenseCam. We address the problem of managing this vast collection of personal images by investigating automatic techniques that: 1. Identify distinct events within a full day of lifelog images (which typically consists of 2,000 images) e.g. breakfast, working on PC, meeting, etc. 2. Find similar events to a given event in a person's lifelog e.g. "show me other events where I was in the park" 3. Determine those events that are more important or unusual to the user and also select a relevant keyframe image for visual display of an event e.g. a "meeting" is more interesting to review than "working on PC" 4. Augment the images from a wearable camera with higher quality images from external "Web 2.0" sources e.g. find me pictures taken by others of the U2 concert in Croke Park In this dissertation we discuss novel techniques to realise each of these facets and how effective they are. The significance of this work is not only of benefit to the lifelogging community, but also to cognitive psychology researchers studying the potential benefits of lifelogging devices to those with neurodegenerative diseases

Hidden Surveillance on Consumer Health Information Websites

Behavioural tracking presents a significant privacy risk to Canadians, particularly when their online behaviours reveal sensitive information that could be used to discriminate against them. This concern is particularly relevant in the context of online health information seeking, since searches can reveal details about health conditions and concerns that the individual may wish to keep private. The privacy threats are exacerbated because behavioural tracking mechanisms are large invisible to users, and many are unaware of the strategies and mechanisms available to track online behaviour. In this project, we seek to document the behavioural tracking practices of consumer health websites, and to examine the privacy policy disclosures of these same practices. The results of our research demonstrate that tracking is widespread on consumer health information websites; furthermore, sites recommended by Information Professionals are similar to sites returned in Google searches in terms of overall tracking, though they show lower levels of third-party advertiser presence. Privacy policy disclosure of tracking practices is largely ineffective, and website visitors cannot easily determine tracking practices from a review of the website privacy policies. Taken together, these results suggest that alternative mechanisms are required to detect and/or mitigate or neutralize the behavioural tracking measures used on many consumer health information websites

Multiresolution Recurrent Neural Networks: An Application to Dialogue Response Generation

We introduce the multiresolution recurrent neural network, which extends the sequence-to-sequence framework to model natural language generation as two parallel discrete stochastic processes: a sequence of high-level coarse tokens, and a sequence of natural language tokens. There are many ways to estimate or learn the high-level coarse tokens, but we argue that a simple extraction procedure is sufficient to capture a wealth of high-level discourse semantics. Such procedure allows training the multiresolution recurrent neural network by maximizing the exact joint log-likelihood over both sequences. In contrast to the standard log- likelihood objective w.r.t. natural language tokens (word perplexity), optimizing the joint log-likelihood biases the model towards modeling high-level abstractions. We apply the proposed model to the task of dialogue response generation in two challenging domains: the Ubuntu technical support domain, and Twitter conversations. On Ubuntu, the model outperforms competing approaches by a substantial margin, achieving state-of-the-art results according to both automatic evaluation metrics and a human evaluation study. On Twitter, the model appears to generate more relevant and on-topic responses according to automatic evaluation metrics. Finally, our experiments demonstrate that the proposed model is more adept at overcoming the sparsity of natural language and is better able to capture long-term structure.Comment: 21 pages, 2 figures, 10 table

Mobitrack - Holistic Measurement of Mobile User Behavior

Amidst the rapid transformation of the wireless industry, the factors driving user behavior and satisfaction are changing. This paper presents MobiTrack, a framework to measure user experience at the point of convergence – devices. The paper compares the MobiTrack framework to alternative methods to measure user experience, and shows the unique advantages of on-device measurements in building a comprehensive view on user experience. Along with data collection, the paper addresses the approaches for analytics, in showing how the presented framework provides value to device vendors and carriers through holistic user research, utilizing adoption models, and stickiness analysis, to complement the data collected from the introduced mobile audience measurement platform