Frand v. Compulsory Licensing: The Lesser of the Two Evils

This paper focuses on two types of licenses that can best be described as outliers—FRAND and compulsory licenses. Overall, these two specific forms of licenses share the objective of producing a fair and reasonable license of a technology protected by intellectual property. The comparable objective notwithstanding, each type of license achieves this end using different mechanisms. The FRAND license emphasizes providing the licensee with reasonable terms, e.g., by preventing a standard patent holder from extracting unreasonably high royalty rates. By contrast, compulsory licenses emphasize the public benefit that flows from enabling access to an otherwise inaccessible invention. Ultimately, both forms of license attempt to create a value for the licensed product that can be remarkably different from the product’s true market value. Nevertheless, both forms ultimately benefit the end-consumer who pays less to access a product subject to either of these forms of license. In comparing these two forms of licenses, the paper hopes to determine whether one form is better than the other, and if so, from whose perspective—the consumer, the licensor or the licensee. In doing so, this paper compares the different prevailing efforts to embrace such licenses as well as the impact of such licenses on the industry

Spartan Daily, September 7, 1990

Volume 95, Issue 6https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/8006/thumbnail.jp

Investigation of dynamic three-dimensional tangible touchscreens: Usability and feasibility

The ability for touchscreen controls to move from two physical dimensions to three dimensions may soon be possible. Though solutions exist for enhanced tactile touchscreen interaction using vibrotactile devices, no definitive commercial solution yet exists for providing real, physical shape to the virtual buttons on a touchscreen display. Of the many next steps in interface technology, this paper concentrates on the path leading to tangible, dynamic, touchscreen surfaces. An experiment was performed that explores the usage differences between a flat surface touchscreen and one augmented with raised surface controls. The results were mixed. The combination of tactile-visual modalities had a negative effect on task completion time when visual attention was focused on a single task (single target task time increased by 8% and the serial target task time increased by 6%). On the other hand, the dual modality had a positive effect on error rate when visual attention was divided between two tasks (the serial target error rate decreased by 50%). In addition to the experiment, this study also investigated the feasibility of creating a dynamic, three dimensional, tangible touchscreen. A new interface solution may be possible by inverting the traditional touchscreen architecture and integrating emerging technologies such as organic light emitting diode (OLED) displays and electrorheological fluid based tactile pins

A framework for the design, prototyping and evaluation of mobile interfaces for domestic environments

The idea of the smart home has been discussed for over three decades, but it has yet to achieve mass-market adoption. This thesis asks the question Why is my home not smart? It highlights four main areas that are barriers to adoption, and concentrates on a single one of these issues: usability. It presents an investigation that focuses on design, prototyping and evaluation of mobile interfaces for domestic environments resulting in the development of a novel framework. A smart home is the physical realisation of a ubiquitous computing system for domestic living. The research area offers numerous benefits to end-users such as convenience, assistive living, energy saving and improved security and safety. However, these benefits have yet to become accessible due to a lack of usable smart home control interfaces. This issue is considered a key reason for lack of adoption and is the focus for this thesis. Within this thesis, a framework is introduced as a novel approach for the design, prototyping and evaluation of mobile interfaces for domestic environments. Included within this framework are three components. Firstly, the Reconfigurable Multimedia Environment (RME), a physical evaluation and observation space for conducting user centred research. Secondly, Simulated Interactive Devices (SID), a video-based development and control tool for simulating interactive devices commonly found within a smart home. Thirdly, iProto, a tool that facilitates the production and rapid deployment of high fidelity prototypes for mobile touch screen devices. This framework is evaluated as a round-tripping toolchain for prototyping smart home control and found to be an efficient process for facilitating the design and evaluation of such interfaces

Proceedings of the 3rd IUI Workshop on Interacting with Smart Objects

These are the Proceedings of the 3rd IUI Workshop on Interacting with Smart Objects. Objects that we use in our everyday life are expanding their restricted interaction capabilities and provide functionalities that go far beyond their original functionality. They feature computing capabilities and are thus able to capture information, process and store it and interact with their environments, turning them into smart objects

Two Hand Gesture Based 3D Navigation in Virtual Environments

Natural interaction is gaining popularity due to its simple, attractive, and realistic nature, which realizes direct Human Computer Interaction (HCI). In this paper, we presented a novel two hand gesture based interaction technique for 3 dimensional (3D) navigation in Virtual Environments (VEs). The system used computer vision techniques for the detection of hand gestures (colored thumbs) from real scene and performed different navigation (forward, backward, up, down, left, and right) tasks in the VE. The proposed technique also allow users to efficiently control speed during navigation. The proposed technique is implemented via a VE for experimental purposes. Forty (40) participants performed the experimental study. Experiments revealed that the proposed technique is feasible, easy to learn and use, having less cognitive load on users. Finally gesture recognition engines were used to assess the accuracy and performance of the proposed gestures. kNN achieved high accuracy rates (95.7%) as compared to SVM (95.3%). kNN also has high performance rates in terms of training time (3.16 secs) and prediction speed (6600 obs/sec) as compared to SVM with 6.40 secs and 2900 obs/sec