InfoKiosk: An Information Kiosk With Text-Free User Interface

Title from PDF of title page, viewed on January 20, 2011.Thesis advisor: Deep Medhi.Vita.Includes bibliographic references (pages 53-55).Thesis (M.S.)--School of Computing and Engineering. University of Missouri--Kansas City, 2010.Even though computer usage may seem very intuitive to almost everyone, they have minimum usability requirements that the user's ability to read is in the language being used. In developing countries such as India, where the adult literacy rate is 66%, this basic requirement for computer usage is its major hindrance. Some other hindrances to accessing modern technology are socio-economic inequality and cultural diversity. InfoKiosk is an end-user application as a step towards providing a text-free user interface (UI) using an existing architectural framework. InfoKiosk UI is designed using features such as action images to represent types of information, mouse-over audio for navigation help, and universal help videos throughout every screen of the application. User inputs and outputs to InfoKiosk are kept intuitive and easy to understand. Two kinds of possible user inputs are - audio and mouse click. In response, the user will receive streaming audio and/or video from YouTube or the InforKiosk server. The design and development of InfoKiosk involve working with technologies such as Java Sound API and, Lumenvox text-to-speech translator.Abstract -- List of Tables -- List of Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Overview -- Application Component Choices -- Architectural Framework for Network Behind InfoKiosk -- Application Design, Implementation and Testing -- Conclusion and Future Work -- Appendix -- References -- Vita

Using question-specific vocabularies to support speech data collection with SALAAM

There has been an increasing use of small-vocabulary spoken dialogue systems in low-resource settings for information dissemination and data collection. This provides an opportunity to reduce the information gap in low-resource settings in which low-literacy is a huge hindrance to the adoption of Information Communication Technologies (ICTs). Since the languages spoken in these areas are computationally low-resourced, they rely on techniques such as crosslanguage phoneme mapping to facilitate fast development of small-vocabulary speech recognisers. Despite the success of this technique, there has been a lack of guidance on how to deploy such systems across a range of languages. This study presents a systematic exploration of the suitability and limitations of using crosslanguage phoneme mapping for the development of small-vocabulary speech recognisers for computationally low-resource languages, particularly Bantu languages. Five target languages and four source languages were used in the study. Speech-based Accent Learning And Articulation Mapping (SALAAM), a cross-language phoneme mapping algorithm was used to aid the study based on its implementation in an open-source tool Lex4All. The following research questions guided our investigations: i) What impact does source language choice have on recognition accuracy, ii) What impact does gender composition of the training data set have on recognition accuracy and iii) What impact do varied alternative pronunciations per word type have on recognition accuracy. Data for the target languages was collected from 104 university student volunteers consisting of 58 female and 46 male students. The results showed that target and source language phonetic similarity as well as gender composition of the training datasets affects recognition accuracy of speech applications developed using cross-language phoneme mapping techniques. They also showed that increasing the number of alternative pronunciations per word in the vocabulary generally increases recognition accuracy although with a slower system response time. This study provides evidence that a careful selection of the source language, gender composition of the training data and the number of alternative pronunciations per word can improve the recognition accuracy of speech recognisers developed using cross-language phoneme mapping

Beyond the GUI in agriculture: a bibliographic review, challenges and opportunities

Different reasons have lead to an increased interest in ICTs applications to the agriculture, like precision farming or agricultural robotics. However the GUI remains the most common interface today, a host of other interfaces are becoming increasingly prevalent, such as speech based, gestural, haptics, multimodal, etc. This work presents a bibliographic review about the inclusion of nontraditional interactions (named beyond the GUI interfaces after Kortum) for different operations in the agricultural fields, a qualitative analysis and some challenges and opportunities found

Beyond the GUI in agriculture : A bibliographic review, challenges and opportunities

Different reasons have lead to an increased interest in ICTs applications to the agriculture, like precision farming or agricultural robotics. However the GUI remains the most common interface today, a host of other interfaces are becoming increasingly prevalent, such as speech based, gestural, haptics, multimodal, etc. This work presents a bibliographic review about the inclusion of nontraditional interactions (named beyond the GUI interfaces after Kortum) for different operations in the agricultural fields, a qualitative analysis and some challenges and opportunities found.Laboratorio de Investigación y Formación en Informática Avanzad

How to choose a mobile phone for an ICT4D project

At the beginning of an ICT4D project where mobile phones will be used, the question that researchers and practitioners ponder is: what mobile device will be best for the project? In this paper, we present guidelines for making this choice, based on lessons drawn from a review of 30 ICT4D projects, and the reflection of our own work with Community Health Workers in Lesotho in the last four years, during which we used three types of devices in the field. We discuss the considerations that can guide the process of selecting the best device or mobile platform for each project and context, and discuss the recent upsurge of smartphone preference over feature phones in ICT4D projects, and the factors to consider when selecting smartphones for fieldwork

Tapping the full potential of the digital revolution for agricultural extension: an emerging innovation agenda

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