An Interactive App for Color Deficient Viewers

Color deficient individuals have trouble seeing color contrasts that could be very apparent to individuals with normal color vision. For example, for some color deficient individuals, red and green apples do not have the striking contrast they have for those with normal color vision, or the abundance of red cherries in a tree is not immediately clear due to a lack of perceived contrast. We present a smartphone app that enables color deficient users to visualize such problematic color contrasts in order to help them with daily tasks. The user interacts with the app through the touchscreen. As the user traces a path around the touchscreen, the colors in the image change continuously via a transform that enhances contrasts that are weak or imperceptible for the user under native viewing conditions. Specifically, we propose a transform that shears the data along lines parallel to the dimension corresponding to the affected cone sensitivity of the user. The amount and direction of shear are controlled by the user'sfinger movement over the touchscreen allowing them to visualize these contrasts. Using the GPU, this simple transformation, consisting of a linear shear and translation, is performed efficiently on each pixel and in real-time with the changing position of the user's finger. The user can use the app to aid daily tasks such as distinguishing between red and green apples or picking out ripe bananas

Sustainable Solution For Plastic Waste Management And Education Campaigns To Mitigate Plastic Consumption And Foster Behavior Change

The issue of plastic waste has become a significant environmental concern in contemporary times. Given the escalating rates of plastic production and consumption worldwide, an urgent need is to implement effective strategies to manage plastic waste. This article aims to investigate sustainable strategies for managing plastic waste through an analysis of existing research and exemplary approaches in the domain. This research assesses diverse methodologies, such as recycling, waste minimization, biodegradable substitutes, and policy interventions, and appraises their efficacy, obstacles, and prospects for enduring sustainability. The results of this research emphasize the significance of inclusive and cohesive approaches that engage various actors in addressing plastic pollution and attaining a more environmentally sound tomorrow

Am I Enough

Master of Fine Arts (MFA)Art and DesignUniversity of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/156110/1/DeepBlue_Brown_2018_MFA_Thesis.pd

Toward A Theory of Media Reconciliation: An Exploratory Study of Closed Captioning

This project is an interdisciplinary empirical study that explores the emotional experiences resulting from the use of the assistive technology closed captioning. More specifically, this study focuses on documenting the user experiences of both the D/deaf and Hearing multimedia user in an effort to better identify and understand those variables and processes that are involved with facilitating and supporting connotative and emotional meaning making. There is an ever present gap that defines closed captioning studies thus far, and this gap is defined by the emphasis on understanding and measuring denotative meaning making behavior while largely ignoring connotative meaning making behavior that is necessarily an equal participant in a user\u27s viewing experience. This study explores connotative and emotional meaning making behaviors so as to better understand the behavior exhibited by users engaged with captioned multimedia. To that end, a mixed methods design was developed that utilizes qualitative methods from the field of User Experience (UX) to explore connotative equivalence between D/deaf and Hearing users and an augmented version of S. R. Gulliver and G. Ghinea\u27s (2003) quantitative measure Information Assimilation (IA) from the field of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) to measure the denotative equivalence between the two user types. To measure denotative equivalence a quiz containing open-ended questions to measure IA was used. To measure connotative equivalence the following measures were used: 1) Likert scales to measure users\u27 confidence in answers to open-ended questions. 2) Likert scale to measure a users\u27 interest in the stimulus. 3) Open - ended questions to identify scenes that elicited the strongest emotional responses from users. 4) Four- level response questions with accompanying Likert scales to determine strength of emotional reaction to three select excerpts from the stimulus. 5) An interview consisting of three open- ended questions and one fixed - choice question. This study found that there were no major differences in the denotative equivalence between the D/deaf and Hearing groups; however, there were important differences in the emotional reactions to the stimulus that indicate there was not connotative equivalence between the groups in response to the emotional content. More importantly, this study found that the strategies used to understand the information users were presented with in order to create both denotative and connotative meaning differed between groups and individuals within groups. To explain such behaviors observed, this work offers a theory of Media Reconciliation based on Wolfgang Iser\u27s (1980) phenomenological theory about the \u27virtual text\u27

Support for Language Learners by Designing a Personalized Voice Assistant

This study analyzes the learning experience of studying foreign languages (FLs) and designs a personal voice assistant to support users. Learning FL is a big challenge. The challenge of learning a new language including how language is used is ‘influenced by’ or is a direct result of the context in which communication takes place. The author\u27s self-experience as an international student informs this study and provides access to a broad range of peers at the institution who have similar experiences. On the other hand, by utilizing voice assistant (VA), users build a relationship with VA and learners can understand multiple language backgrounds and cultures. Through in-depth interviews, participants—recruited from campus—were asked questions about why one wants to learn FL, how one learns FL, which tools one used to support learning, the challenges one meets with this experience, etc. This research asks about one’s learning experience and shares the researcher idea with VA utilizing it in supporting learning FL. This study does two sets of interviews with same group participants in order to collect interviewees’ experiences and feedback through the design process. In a sample size of 18 participants, this research understands how culture, background and environment influence FL learners’ experiences during studying a new language. Some interviewees live in foreign places and feel anxious using FL to communicate with native speakers. Some interviewees live in native and want to know more about FL’s different cultures locally. With this study, this author designs a personal voice assistant and supports learners with learning foreign languages

Context aware advertising

IP Television (IPTV) has created a new arena for digital advertising that has not been explored to its full potential yet. IPTV allows users to retrieve on demand content and recommended content; however, very limited research has been applied in the domain of advertising in IPTV systems. The diversity of the field led to a lot of mature efforts in the fields of content recommendation and mobile advertising. The introduction of IPTV and smart devices led to the ability to gather more context information that was not subject of study before. This research attempts at studying the different contextual parameters, how to enrich the advertising context to tailor better ads for users, devising a recommendation engine that utilizes the new context, building a prototype to prove the viability of the system and evaluating it on different quality of service and quality of experience measures. To tackle this problem, a review of the state of the art in the field of context-aware advertising as well as the related field of context-aware multimedia have been studied. The intent was to come up with the most relevant contextual parameters that can possibly yield a higher percentage precision for recommending advertisements to users. Subsequently, a prototype application was also developed to validate the feasibility and viability of the approach. The prototype gathers contextual information related to the number of viewers, their age, genders, viewing angles as well as their emotions. The gathered context is then dispatched to a web service which generates advertisement recommendations and sends them back to the user. A scheduler was also implemented to identify the most suitable time to push advertisements to users based on their attention span. To achieve our contributions, a corpus of 421 ads was gathered and processed for streaming. The advertisements were displayed in reality during the holy month of Ramadan, 2016. A data gathering application was developed where sample users were presented with 10 random ads and asked to rate and evaluate the advertisements according to a predetermined criteria. The gathered data was used for training the recommendation engine and computing the latent context-item preferences. This also served to identify the performance of a system that randomly sends advertisements to users. The resulting performance is used as a benchmark to compare our results against. When it comes to the recommendation engine itself, several implementation options were considered that pertain to the methodology to create a vector representation of an advertisement as well as the metric to use to measure the similarity between two advertisement vectors. The goal is to find a representation of advertisements that circumvents the cold start problem and the best similarity measure to use with the different vectorization techniques. A set of experiments have been designed and executed to identify the right vectorization methodology and similarity measure to apply in this problem domain. To evaluate the overall performance of the system, several experiments were designed and executed that cover different quality aspects of the system such as quality of service, quality of experience and quality of context. All three aspects have been measured and our results show that our recommendation engine exhibits a significant improvement over other mechanisms of pushing ads to users that are employed in currently existing systems. The other mechanisms placed in comparison are the random ad generation and targeted ad generation. Targeted ads mechanism relies on demographic information of the viewer with disregard to his/her historical consumption. Our system showed a precision percentage of 69.70% which means that roughly 7 out of 10 recommended ads are actually liked and viewed to the end by the viewer. The practice of randomly generating ads yields a result of 41.11% precision which means that only 4 out of 10 recommended ads are actually liked by viewers. The targeted ads system resulted in 51.39% precision. Our results show that a significant improvement can be introduced when employing context within a recommendation engine. When introducing emotion context, our results show a significant improvement in case the user’s emotion is happiness; however, it showed a degradation of performance when the user’s emotion is sadness. When considering all emotions, the overall results did not show a significant improvement. It is worth noting though that ads recommended based on detected emotions using our systems proved to always be relevant to the user\u27s current mood

colorspace: A Toolbox for Manipulating and Assessing Colors and Palettes

The R package colorspace provides a flexible toolbox for selecting individual colors or color palettes, manipulating these colors, and employing them in statistical graphics and data visualizations. In particular, the package provides a broad range of color palettes based on the HCL (hue-chroma-luminance) color space. The three HCL dimensions have been shown to match those of the human visual system very well, thus facilitating intuitive selection of color palettes through trajectories in this space. Using the HCL color model, general strategies for three types of palettes are implemented: (1) Qualitative for coding categorical information, i.e., where no particular ordering of categories is available. (2) Sequential for coding ordered/numeric information, i.e., going from high to low (or vice versa). (3) Diverging for coding ordered/numeric information around a central neutral value, i.e., where colors diverge from neutral to two extremes. To aid selection and application of these palettes, the package also contains scales for use with ggplot2, shiny and tcltk apps for interactive exploration, visualizations of palette properties, accompanying manipulation utilities (like desaturation and lighten/darken), and emulation of color vision deficiencies. The shiny apps are also hosted online at http://hclwizard.org/

Exploring Multi-Sensory Curriculum Development: Grades 3-5 Science In A Virtual Environment

The capstone thesis uses a qualitative research approach to explore the question: What are virtual tools and multi-sensory strategies that can be integrated into curriculum development to support the engagement of learners in science in grades 3-5 in virtual learning environments? The author chose this topic to find and to apply multi-sensory strategies, including technology-rich approaches, in virtual education, and developed a new curriculum unit using current sensory-rich technologies. The goal is to enhance and enrich curriculum, and thereby to increase student engagement in the sciences. Applying these tools in virtual education and using multi-sensory approaches can lead to new possibilities. The possibilities of using virtual and augmented reality tools is examined in relationship to the content area. Topics explored in the review of the literature include Gardner, Dewey, Montessori, Piaget, and virtual education using virtual reality, augmented reality, and programs and applications for virtual and face-to-face classrooms. The limitations and dangers of these tools, as well as their benefits, are discussed. Understanding by Design (UbD) and a constructivist teaching approach, and an integrated approach using these technologies, are used to develop a unit of science curriculum in Ocean Science, refreshed from a successful traditional unit. The author finds the multiple intelligences and the sensory approaches from Gardner and the multi-sensory, constructivist approaches most pivotal. Montessori seems to be the most knowledgeable about the importance of multi-sensory education itself. Integrating technological applications, including virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) applications, and examining ongoing research, proves productive. The field of technology in education is an ever-changing and ever-expanding field. The author suggests it may be effective within a school system, district and classroom to develop a technology and curriculum review team to face the many decisions, challenges, and changes technology in the classroom brings. The author concludes that to broaden multi-sensory approaches, used in any form, in any educational environment, will benefit every student. For the developed curriculum, the limitations, implications, and recommendations for future research are discussed