20 research outputs found
Blending the Material and Digital World for Hybrid Interfaces
The development of digital technologies in the 21st century is progressing continuously and new device classes such as tablets, smartphones or smartwatches are finding their way into our everyday lives. However, this development also poses problems, as these prevailing touch and gestural interfaces often lack tangibility, take little account of haptic qualities and therefore require full attention from their users. Compared to traditional tools and analog interfaces, the human skills to experience and manipulate material in its natural environment and context remain unexploited. To combine the best of both, a key question is how it is possible to blend the material world and digital world to design and realize novel hybrid interfaces in a meaningful way. Research on Tangible User Interfaces (TUIs) investigates the coupling between physical objects and virtual data. In contrast, hybrid interfaces, which specifically aim to digitally enrich analog artifacts of everyday work, have not yet been sufficiently researched and systematically discussed.
Therefore, this doctoral thesis rethinks how user interfaces can provide useful digital functionality while maintaining their physical properties and familiar patterns of use in the real world. However, the development of such hybrid interfaces raises overarching research questions about the design: Which kind of physical interfaces are worth exploring? What type of digital enhancement will improve existing interfaces? How can hybrid interfaces retain their physical properties while enabling new digital functions? What are suitable methods to explore different design? And how to support technology-enthusiast users in prototyping?
For a systematic investigation, the thesis builds on a design-oriented, exploratory and iterative development process using digital fabrication methods and novel materials. As a main contribution, four specific research projects are presented that apply and discuss different visual and interactive augmentation principles along real-world applications. The applications range from digitally-enhanced paper, interactive cords over visual watch strap extensions to novel prototyping tools for smart garments. While almost all of them integrate visual feedback and haptic input, none of them are built on rigid, rectangular pixel screens or use standard input modalities, as they all aim to reveal new design approaches. The dissertation shows how valuable it can be to rethink familiar, analog applications while thoughtfully extending them digitally. Finally, this thesis’ extensive work of engineering versatile research platforms is accompanied by overarching conceptual work, user evaluations and technical experiments, as well as literature reviews.Die Durchdringung digitaler Technologien im 21. Jahrhundert schreitet stetig voran und neue Geräteklassen wie Tablets, Smartphones oder Smartwatches erobern unseren Alltag. Diese Entwicklung birgt aber auch Probleme, denn die vorherrschenden berührungsempfindlichen Oberflächen berücksichtigen kaum haptische Qualitäten und erfordern daher die volle Aufmerksamkeit ihrer Nutzer:innen. Im Vergleich zu traditionellen Werkzeugen und analogen Schnittstellen bleiben die menschlichen Fähigkeiten ungenutzt, die Umwelt mit allen Sinnen zu begreifen und wahrzunehmen. Um das Beste aus beiden Welten zu vereinen, stellt sich daher die Frage, wie neuartige hybride Schnittstellen sinnvoll gestaltet und realisiert werden können, um die materielle und die digitale Welt zu verschmelzen. In der Forschung zu Tangible User Interfaces (TUIs) wird die Verbindung zwischen physischen Objekten und virtuellen Daten untersucht. Noch nicht ausreichend erforscht wurden hingegen hybride Schnittstellen, die speziell darauf abzielen, physische Gegenstände des Alltags digital zu erweitern und anhand geeigneter Designparameter und Entwurfsräume systematisch zu untersuchen.
In dieser Dissertation wird daher untersucht, wie Materialität und Digitalität nahtlos ineinander übergehen können. Es soll erforscht werden, wie künftige Benutzungsschnittstellen nützliche digitale Funktionen bereitstellen können, ohne ihre physischen Eigenschaften und vertrauten Nutzungsmuster in der realen Welt zu verlieren. Die Entwicklung solcher hybriden Ansätze wirft jedoch übergreifende Forschungsfragen zum Design auf: Welche Arten von physischen Schnittstellen sind es wert, betrachtet zu werden? Welche Art von digitaler Erweiterung verbessert das Bestehende? Wie können hybride Konzepte ihre physischen Eigenschaften beibehalten und gleichzeitig neue digitale Funktionen ermöglichen? Was sind geeignete Methoden, um verschiedene Designs zu erforschen? Wie kann man Technologiebegeisterte bei der Erstellung von Prototypen unterstützen?
Für eine systematische Untersuchung stützt sich die Arbeit auf einen designorientierten, explorativen und iterativen Entwicklungsprozess unter Verwendung digitaler Fabrikationsmethoden und neuartiger Materialien. Im Hauptteil werden vier Forschungsprojekte vorgestellt, die verschiedene visuelle und interaktive Prinzipien entlang realer Anwendungen diskutieren. Die Szenarien reichen von digital angereichertem Papier, interaktiven Kordeln über visuelle Erweiterungen von Uhrarmbändern bis hin zu neuartigen Prototyping-Tools für intelligente Kleidungsstücke. Um neue Designansätze aufzuzeigen, integrieren nahezu alle visuelles Feedback und haptische Eingaben, um Alternativen zu Standard-Eingabemodalitäten auf starren Pixelbildschirmen zu schaffen. Die Dissertation hat gezeigt, wie wertvoll es sein kann, bekannte, analoge Anwendungen zu überdenken und sie dabei gleichzeitig mit Bedacht digital zu erweitern. Dabei umfasst die vorliegende Arbeit sowohl realisierte technische Forschungsplattformen als auch übergreifende konzeptionelle Arbeiten, Nutzerstudien und technische Experimente sowie die Analyse existierender Forschungsarbeiten
Geographic information extraction from texts
A large volume of unstructured texts, containing valuable geographic information, is available online. This information – provided implicitly or explicitly – is useful not only for scientific studies (e.g., spatial humanities) but also for many practical applications (e.g., geographic information retrieval). Although large progress has been achieved in geographic information extraction from texts, there are still unsolved challenges and issues, ranging from methods, systems, and data, to applications and privacy. Therefore, this workshop will provide a timely opportunity to discuss the recent advances, new ideas, and concepts but also identify research gaps in geographic information extraction
Modern Socio-Technical Perspectives on Privacy
This open access book provides researchers and professionals with a foundational understanding of online privacy as well as insight into the socio-technical privacy issues that are most pertinent to modern information systems, covering several modern topics (e.g., privacy in social media, IoT) and underexplored areas (e.g., privacy accessibility, privacy for vulnerable populations, cross-cultural privacy). The book is structured in four parts, which follow after an introduction to privacy on both a technical and social level: Privacy Theory and Methods covers a range of theoretical lenses through which one can view the concept of privacy. The chapters in this part relate to modern privacy phenomena, thus emphasizing its relevance to our digital, networked lives. Next, Domains covers a number of areas in which privacy concerns and implications are particularly salient, including among others social media, healthcare, smart cities, wearable IT, and trackers. The Audiences section then highlights audiences that have traditionally been ignored when creating privacy-preserving experiences: people from other (non-Western) cultures, people with accessibility needs, adolescents, and people who are underrepresented in terms of their race, class, gender or sexual identity, religion or some combination. Finally, the chapters in Moving Forward outline approaches to privacy that move beyond one-size-fits-all solutions, explore ethical considerations, and describe the regulatory landscape that governs privacy through laws and policies. Perhaps even more so than the other chapters in this book, these chapters are forward-looking by using current personalized, ethical and legal approaches as a starting point for re-conceptualizations of privacy to serve the modern technological landscape. The book’s primary goal is to inform IT students, researchers, and professionals about both the fundamentals of online privacy and the issues that are most pertinent to modern information systems. Lecturers or teacherscan assign (parts of) the book for a “professional issues” course. IT professionals may select chapters covering domains and audiences relevant to their field of work, as well as the Moving Forward chapters that cover ethical and legal aspects. Academicswho are interested in studying privacy or privacy-related topics will find a broad introduction in both technical and social aspects
Human-AI Interaction in the Presence of Ambiguity: From Deliberation-based Labeling to Ambiguity-aware AI
Ambiguity, the quality of being open to more than one interpretation, permeates our lives. It comes in different forms including linguistic and visual ambiguity, arises for various reasons and gives rise to disagreements among human observers that can be hard or impossible to resolve. As artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly infused into complex domains of human decision making it is crucial that the underlying AI mechanisms also support a notion of ambiguity. Yet, existing AI approaches typically assume that there is a single correct answer for any given input, lacking mechanisms to incorporate diverse human perspectives in various parts of the AI pipeline, including data labeling, model development and user interface design.
This dissertation aims to shed light on the question of how humans and AI can be effective partners in the presence of ambiguous problems. To address this question, we begin by studying group deliberation as a tool to detect and analyze ambiguous cases in data labeling. We present three case studies that investigate group deliberation in the context of different labeling tasks, data modalities and types of human labeling expertise.
First, we present CrowdDeliberation, an online platform for synchronous group deliberation in novice crowd work, and show how worker deliberation affects resolvability and accuracy in text classification tasks of varying subjectivity. We then translate our findings to the expert domain of medical image classification to demonstrate how imposing additional structure on deliberation arguments can improve the efficiency of the deliberation process without compromising its reliability. Finally, we present CrowdEEG, an online platform for collaborative annotation and deliberation of medical time series data, implementing an asynchronous and highly structured deliberation process. Our findings from an observational study with 36 sleep health professionals help explain how disagreements arise and when they can be resolved through group deliberation.
Beyond investigating group deliberation within data labeling, we also demonstrate how the resulting deliberation data can be used to support both human and artificial intelligence. To this end, we first present results from a controlled experiment with ten medical generalists, suggesting that reading deliberation data from medical specialists significantly improves generalists' comprehension and diagnostic accuracy on difficult patient cases. Second, we leverage deliberation data to simulate and investigate AI assistants that not only highlight ambiguous cases, but also explain the underlying sources of ambiguity to end users in human-interpretable terms. We provide evidence suggesting that this form of ambiguity-aware AI can help end users to triage and trust AI-provided data classifications.
We conclude by outlining the main contributions of this dissertation and directions for future research
Robotics in Germany and Japan
This book comprehends an intercultural and interdisciplinary framework including current research fields like Roboethics, Hermeneutics of Technologies, Technology Assessment, Robotics in Japanese Popular Culture and Music Robots. Contributions on cultural interrelations, technical visions and essays are rounding out the content of this book
Usability analysis of contending electronic health record systems
In this paper, we report measured usability of two leading EHR systems during procurement. A total of 18 users participated in paired-usability testing of three scenarios: ordering and managing medications by an outpatient physician, medicine administration by an inpatient nurse and scheduling of appointments by nursing staff. Data for audio, screen capture, satisfaction rating, task success and errors made was collected during testing. We found a clear difference between the systems for percentage of successfully completed tasks, two different satisfaction measures and perceived learnability when looking at the results over all scenarios. We conclude that usability should be evaluated during procurement and the difference in usability between systems could be revealed even with fewer measures than were used in our study. © 2019 American Psychological Association Inc. All rights reserved.Peer reviewe
Geoinformatics in Citizen Science
The book features contributions that report original research in the theoretical, technological, and social aspects of geoinformation methods, as applied to supporting citizen science. Specifically, the book focuses on the technological aspects of the field and their application toward the recruitment of volunteers and the collection, management, and analysis of geotagged information to support volunteer involvement in scientific projects. Internationally renowned research groups share research in three areas: First, the key methods of geoinformatics within citizen science initiatives to support scientists in discovering new knowledge in specific application domains or in performing relevant activities, such as reliable geodata filtering, management, analysis, synthesis, sharing, and visualization; second, the critical aspects of citizen science initiatives that call for emerging or novel approaches of geoinformatics to acquire and handle geoinformation; and third, novel geoinformatics research that could serve in support of citizen science
Designing gaze-based interaction for pervasive public displays
The last decade witnessed an increasing adoption of public interactive displays.
Displays can now be seen in many public areas, such as shopping malls, and train stations. There is also a growing trend towards using large public displays especially in airports, urban areas, universities and libraries.
Meanwhile, advances in eye tracking and visual computing promise straightforward integration of eye tracking on these displays for both: 1) monitoring the user's visual behavior to evaluate different aspects of the display, such as measuring the visual attention of passersby, and for 2) interaction purposes, such as allowing users to provide input, retrieve content, or transfer data using their eye movements.
Gaze is particularly useful for pervasive public displays. In addition to being natural and intuitive, eye gaze can be detected from a distance, bringing interactivity to displays that are physically unreachable. Gaze reflects the user's intention and visual interests, and its subtle nature makes it well-suited for public interactions where social embarrassment and privacy concerns might hinder the experience.
On the downside, eye tracking technologies have traditionally been developed for desktop settings, where a user interacts from a stationary position and for a relatively long period of time. Interaction with public displays is fundamentally different and hence poses unique challenges when employing eye tracking. First, users of public displays are dynamic; users could approach the display from different directions, and interact from different positions or even while moving. This means that gaze-enabled displays should not expect users to be stationary at a specific position, but instead adapt to users' ever-changing position in front of the display. Second, users of public displays typically interact for short durations, often for a few seconds only. This means that contrary to desktop settings, public displays cannot afford requiring users to perform time-consuming calibration prior to interaction.
In this publications-based dissertation, we first report on a review of challenges of interactive public displays, and discuss the potential of gaze in addressing these challenges. We then showcase the implementation and in-depth evaluation of two applications where gaze is leveraged to address core problems in today's public displays. The first presents an eye-based solution, EyePACT, that tackles the parallax effect which is often experienced on today's touch-based public displays.
We found that EyePACT significantly improves accuracy even with varying degrees of parallax. The second is a novel multimodal system, GTmoPass, that combines gaze and touch input for secure user authentication on public displays. GTmoPass was found to be highly resilient to shoulder surfing, thermal attacks and smudge attacks, thereby offering a secure solution to an important problem on public displays.
The second part of the dissertation explores specific challenges of gaze-based interaction with public displays. First, we address the user positioning problem by means of active eye tracking. More specifically, we built a novel prototype, EyeScout, that dynamically moves the eye tracker based on the user's position without augmenting the user. This, in turn, allowed us to study and understand gaze-based interaction with public displays while walking, and when approaching the display from different positions. An evaluation revealed that EyeScout is well perceived by users, and improves the time needed to initiate gaze interaction by 62% compared to state-of-the-art. Second, we propose a system, Read2Calibrate, for calibrating eye trackers implicitly while users read text on displays. We found that although text-based calibration is less accurate than traditional methods, it integrates smoothly while reading and thereby more suitable for public displays. Finally, through our prototype system, EyeVote, we show how to allow users to select textual options on public displays via gaze without calibration. In a field deployment of EyeVote, we studied the trade-off between accuracy and selection speed when using calibration-free selection techniques. We found that users of public displays value faster interactions over accurate ones, and are willing to correct system errors in case of inaccuracies.
We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings on the design of gaze-based interaction for public displays, and how our work can be adapted for other domains apart from public displays, such as on handheld mobile devices.In den letzten zehn Jahren wurden vermehrt interaktive Displays in öffentlichen Bereichen wie Einkaufszentren, Flughäfen und Bahnhöfen eingesetzt. Große öffentliche Displays finden sich zunehmend in städtischen Gebieten, beispielsweise in Universitäten und Bibliotheken. Fortschritte in der Eye-Tracking-Technologie und der Bildverarbeitung versprechen eine einfache Integration von Eye-Tracking auf diesen Displays. So kann zum einen das visuelle Verhalten der Benutzer verfolgt und damit ein Display nach verschiedenen Aspekten evaluiert werden. Zum anderen eröffnet Eye-Tracking auf öffentlichen Displays neue Interaktionsmöglichkeiten. Blickbasierte Interaktion ist besonders nützlich für Bildschirme im allgegenwärtigen öffentlichen Raum. Der Blick bietet mehr als eine natürliche und intuitive Interaktionsmethode: Blicke können aus der Ferne erkannt und somit für Interaktion mit sonst unerreichbaren Displays genutzt werden. Aus der Interaktion mit dem Blick (Gaze) lassen sich Absichten und visuelle Interessen der Benutzer ableiten. Dadurch eignet es sich besonders für den öffentlichen Raum, wo Nutzer möglicherweise Datenschutzbedenken haben könnten oder sich bei herkömmlichen Methoden gehemmt fühlen würden in der Öffentlichkeit mit den Displays zu interagieren. Dadurch wird ein uneingeschränktes Nutzererlebnis ermöglicht.
Eye-Tracking-Technologien sind jedoch in erster Linie für Desktop-Szenarien entwickelt worden, bei denen ein Benutzer für eine relativ lange Zeitspanne in einer stationären Position mit dem System interagiert. Die Interaktion mit öffentlichen Displays ist jedoch grundlegend anders. Daher gilt es völlig neuartige Herausforderungen zu bewältigen, wenn Eye-Tracking eingesetzt wird. Da sich Nutzer von öffentlichen Displays bewegen, können sie sich dem Display aus verschiedenen Richtungen nähern und sogar währenddessen mit dem Display interagieren. Folglich sollten "Gaze-enabled Displays" nicht davon ausgehen, dass Nutzer sich stets an einer bestimmten Position befinden, sondern sollten sich an die ständig wechselnde Position des Nutzers anpassen können. Zum anderen interagieren Nutzer von öffentlichen Displays üblicherweise nur für eine kurze Zeitspannen von ein paar Sekunden. Eine zeitaufwändige Kalibrierung durch den Nutzer vor der eigentlichen Interaktion ist hier im Gegensatz zu Desktop-Szenarien also nicht adäquat.
Diese kumulative Dissertation überprüft zunächst die Herausforderungen interaktiver öffentlicher Displays und diskutiert das Potenzial von blickbasierter Interaktion zu deren Bewältigung. Anschließend wird die Implementierung und eingehende Evaluierung von zwei beispielhaften Anwendungen vorgestellt, bei denen Nutzer durch den Blick mit öffentlichen Displays interagieren. Daraus ergeben sich weitere greifbare Vorteile der blickbasierten Interaktion für öffentliche Display-Kontexte. Bei der ersten Anwendung, EyePACT, steht der Parallaxeneffekt im Fokus, der heutzutage häufig ein Problem auf öffentlichen Displays darstellt, die über Berührung (Touch) gesteuert werden. Die zweite Anwendung ist ein neuartiges multimodales System, GTmoPass, das Gaze- und Touch-Eingabe zur sicheren Benutzerauthentifizierung auf öffentlichen Displays kombiniert. GTmoPass ist sehr widerstandsfähig sowohl gegenüber unerwünschten fremden Blicken als auch gegenüber sogenannten thermischen Angriffen und Schmierangriffen. Es bietet damit eine sichere Lösung für ein wichtiges Sicherheits- und Datenschutzproblem auf öffentlichen Displays.
Der zweite Teil der Dissertation befasst sich mit spezifischen Herausforderungen der Gaze-Interaktion mit öffentlichen Displays. Zuerst wird der Aspekt der Benutzerpositionierung durch aktives Eye-Tracking adressiert. Der neuartige Prototyp EyeScout bewegt den Eye-Tracker passend zur Position des Nutzers, ohne dass dieser dafür mit weiteren Geräten oder Sensoren ausgestattet werden muss. Dies ermöglicht blickbasierte Interaktion mit öffentlichen Displays auch in jenen Situationen zu untersuchen und zu verstehen, in denen Nutzer in Bewegung sind und sich dem Display von verschiedenen Positionen aus nähern. Zweitens wird das System Read2Calibrate präsentiert, das Eye-Tracker implizit kalibriert, während Nutzer Texte auf Displays lesen. Der Prototyp EyeVote zeigt, wie man die Auswahl von Textantworten auf öffentlichen Displays per Blick ohne Kalibrierung ermöglichen kann. In einer Feldstudie mit EyeVote wird der Kompromiss zwischen Genauigkeit und Auswahlgeschwindigkeit unter der Verwendung kalibrierungsfreier Auswahltechniken untersucht. Die Implikationen der Ergebnisse für das Design von blickbasierter Interaktion öffentlicher Displays werden diskutiert. Abschließend wird erörtert wie die verwendete Methodik auf andere Bereiche, z.B. auf mobilie Geräte, angewendet werden kann
Recommending privacy preferences in location-sharing services
Location-sharing services have become increasingly popular with the proliferation of smartphones and online social networks. People share their locations with each other to record their daily lives or satisfy their social needs. At the same time, inappropriate disclosure of location information poses threats to people's privacy.
One of the reasons why people fail to protect their location privacy is the difficulty of using the current mechanisms to manually configure location-privacy settings. Since people's location-privacy preferences are context-aware, manual configuration is cumbersome. People's incapability and unwillingness to do so lead to unexpected location disclosures that violate their location privacy.
In this thesis, we investigate the feasibility of using recommender systems to help people protect their location privacy. We examine the performance of location-privacy recommender systems and compare it with the state-of-the-art. We also conduct online user studies to understand people's acceptance of such recommender systems and their concerns. We revise our design of the systems according to the results of the user studies.
We find that user-based collaborative filtering can accurately recommend location-privacy preferences and outperform the state-of-the-art when training data are insufficient. From users' perspective, their acceptance of location-privacy recommender systems is affected by the openness and the context of recommendations and their privacy concerns about the systems. It is feasible to use data obfuscation or decentralisation to alleviate people's concerns and meanwhile keep the systems robust against malicious data attacks