Exploring the Affective Loop

Research in psychology and neurology shows that both body and mind are involved when experiencing emotions (Damasio 1994, Davidson et al. 2003). People are also very physical when they try to communicate their emotions. Somewhere in between beings consciously and unconsciously aware of it ourselves, we produce both verbal and physical signs to make other people understand how we feel. Simultaneously, this production of signs involves us in a stronger personal experience of the emotions we express. Emotions are also communicated in the digital world, but there is little focus on users' personal as well as physical experience of emotions in the available digital media. In order to explore whether and how we can expand existing media, we have designed, implemented and evaluated /eMoto/, a mobile service for sending affective messages to others. With eMoto, we explicitly aim to address both cognitive and physical experiences of human emotions. Through combining affective gestures for input with affective expressions that make use of colors, shapes and animations for the background of messages, the interaction "pulls" the user into an /affective loop/. In this thesis we define what we mean by affective loop and present a user-centered design approach expressed through four design principles inspired by previous work within Human Computer Interaction (HCI) but adjusted to our purposes; /embodiment/ (Dourish 2001) as a means to address how people communicate emotions in real life, /flow/ (Csikszentmihalyi 1990) to reach a state of involvement that goes further than the current context, /ambiguity/ of the designed expressions (Gaver et al. 2003) to allow for open-ended interpretation by the end-users instead of simplistic, one-emotion one-expression pairs and /natural but designed expressions/ to address people's natural couplings between cognitively and physically experienced emotions. We also present results from an end-user study of eMoto that indicates that subjects got both physically and emotionally involved in the interaction and that the designed "openness" and ambiguity of the expressions, was appreciated and understood by our subjects. Through the user study, we identified four potential design problems that have to be tackled in order to achieve an affective loop effect; the extent to which users' /feel in control/ of the interaction, /harmony and coherence/ between cognitive and physical expressions/,/ /timing/ of expressions and feedback in a communicational setting, and effects of users' /personality/ on their emotional expressions and experiences of the interaction

User hints for optimisation processes

Innovative improvements in the area of Human-Computer Interaction and User Interfaces have en-abled intuitive and effective applications for a variety of problems. On the other hand, there has also been the realization that several real-world optimization problems still cannot be totally auto-mated. Very often, user interaction is necessary for refining the optimization problem, managing the computational resources available, or validating or adjusting a computer-generated solution. This thesis investigates how humans can help optimization methods to solve such difficult prob-lems. It presents an interactive framework where users play a dynamic and important role by pro-viding hints. Hints are actions that help to insert domain knowledge, to escape from local minima, to reduce the space of solutions to be explored, or to avoid ambiguity when there is more than one optimal solution. Examples of user hints are adjustments of constraints and of an objective function, focusing automatic methods on a subproblem of higher importance, and manual changes of an ex-isting solution. User hints are given in an intuitive way through a graphical interface. Visualization tools are also included in order to inform about the state of the optimization process. We apply the User Hints framework to three combinatorial optimization problems: Graph Clus-tering, Graph Drawing and Map Labeling. Prototype systems are presented and evaluated for each problem. The results of the study indicate that optimization processes can benefit from human interaction. The main goal of this thesis is to list cases where human interaction is helpful, and provide an ar-chitecture for supporting interactive optimization. Our contributions include the general User Hints framework and particular implementations of it for each optimization problem. We also present a general process, with guidelines, for applying our framework to other optimization problems

Symbiosis in computational vision systems

AbstractWhile the goal of computational vision systems is the totally automated understanding of images, it is not necessary for this goal to be achieved before practical vision systems can be developed. In particular, systems that require some amount of human intervention can be applied to real problems with beneficial results. In “symbiotic” vision systems the computer brings something to bear on the problem that either replaces or supplements a subtask that would otherwise be done by a human expert.In symbiotic systems there is a large range of possibilities for the type and amount of interaction that the human expert must provide. This can range from minor aid to the computer system, when it reaches an ambiguity that it cannot resolve, to major control of the processing in complicated regions of the image that are of primary interest. Symbiotic vision systems must allow the user to access the system at the point in the range that is suitable. In addition, the system must have facilities to both present information and accept “advice” from the expert in a way that is natural and convenient.Two example vision systems will illustrate different ways in which these problems have been solved. The first, MISSEE, uses a cycle of perception combined with a schema-based system architecture to provide a flexible framework in which the user can select the amount of interaction he wishes to undertake. The second, which carries out the normal moveout phase of seismic data processing, has a more limited focus, but provides a natural means of communication

Conversational Agents, Humorous Act Construction, and Social Intelligence

Humans use humour to ease communication problems in human-human interaction and \ud in a similar way humour can be used to solve communication problems that arise\ud with human-computer interaction. We discuss the role of embodied conversational\ud agents in human-computer interaction and we have observations on the generation\ud of humorous acts and on the appropriateness of displaying them by embodied\ud conversational agents in order to smoothen, when necessary, their interactions\ud with a human partner. The humorous acts we consider are generated spontaneously.\ud They are the product of an appraisal of the conversational situation and the\ud possibility to generate a humorous act from the elements that make up this\ud conversational situation, in particular the interaction history of the\ud conversational partners

Shape interpretation with design computing

How information is interpreted has significant impact on how it can be used. This is particularly important in design where information from a wide variety of sources is used in a wide variety of contexts and in a wide variety of ways. This paper is concerned with the information that is created, modified and analysed during design processes, specifically with the information that is represented in shapes. It investigates how design computing seeks to support these processes, and the difficulties that arise when it is necessary to consider alternative interpretations of shape. The aim is to establish the problem of shape interpretation as a general challenge for research in design computing, rather than a difficulty that is to be overcome within specific processes. Shape interpretations are common characteristics of several areas of enquiry in design computing. This paper reviews these, brings an integrated perspective and draws conclusions about how this underlying process can be supported

Granular synthesis for display of time-varying probability densities

We present a method for displaying time-varying probabilistic information to users using an asynchronous granular synthesis technique. We extend the basic synthesis technique to include distribution over waveform source, spatial position, pitch and time inside waveforms. To enhance the synthesis in interactive contexts, we "quicken" the display by integrating predictions of user behaviour into the sonification. This includes summing the derivatives of the distribution during exploration of static densities, and using Monte-Carlo sampling to predict future user states in nonlinear dynamic systems. These techniques can be used to improve user performance in continuous control systems and in the interactive exploration of high dimensional spaces. This technique provides feedback from users potential goals, and their progress toward achieving them; modulating the feedback with quickening can help shape the users actions toward achieving these goals. We have applied these techniques to a simple nonlinear control problem as well as to the sonification of on-line probabilistic gesture recognition. We are applying these displays to mobile, gestural interfaces, where visual display is often impractical. The granular synthesis approach is theoretically elegant and easily applied in contexts where dynamic probabilistic displays are required

Human-computer interaction : Guidelines for web animation

Human-computer interaction in the large is an interdisciplinary area which attracts researchers, educators, and practioners from many differenf fields. Human-computer interaction studies a human and a machine in communication, it draws from supporting knowledge on both the machine and the human side. This paper is related to the human side of human-computer interaction and focuses on animations. The growing use of animation in Web pages testifies to the increasing ease with which such multimedia features can be created. This trend shows a commitment to animation that is often unmatched by the skill of the implementers. The paper presents a set of guidelines and tips to help designers prepare better and more effective Web sites. These guidelines are drawn from an extensive literature survey

Regress 3D human pose from 2D skeleton with kinematics knowledge

3D human pose estimation is a hot topic in the field of computer vision. It provides data support for tasks such as pose recognition, human tracking and action recognition. Therefore, it is widely applied in the fields of advanced human-computer interaction, intelligent monitoring and so on. Estimating 3D human pose from a single 2D image is an ill-posed problem and is likely to cause low prediction accuracy, due to the problems of self-occlusion and depth ambiguity. This paper developed two types of human kinematics to improve the estimation accuracy. First, taking the 2D human body skeleton sequence obtained by the 2D human body pose detector as input, a temporal convolutional network is proposed to develop the movement periodicity in temporal domain. Second, geometrical prior knowledge is introduced into the model to constrain the estimated pose to fit the general kinematics knowledge. The experiments are tested on Human3.6M and MPII (Max Planck Institut Informatik) Human Pose (MPI-INF-3DHP) datasets, and the proposed model shows better generalization ability compared with the baseline and the state-of-the-art models

Sonification of probabilistic feedback through granular synthesis

We describe a method to improve user feedback, specifically the display of time-varying probabilistic information, through asynchronous granular synthesis. We have applied these techniques to challenging control problems as well as to the sonification of online probabilistic gesture recognition. We're using these displays in mobile, gestural interfaces where visual display is often impractical

Getting the message across : ten principles for web animation

The growing use of animation in Web pages testifies to the increasing ease with which such multimedia components can be created. This trend indicates a commitment to animation that is often unmatched by the skill of the implementers. The present paper details a set of ten commandments for web animation, intending to sensitise budding animators to key aspects that may impair the communicational effectiveness of their animation. These guidelines are drawn from an extensive literature survey coloured by personal experience of using Web animation packages. Our ten principles are further elucidated by a Web-based on-line tutorial