Human computer interaction and data visualization

In 2013, SINTEF cited that 90% of the world’s data had been created over the past two years.1 With the onset of Big Data, the ability to analyze data at a rate directly proportional to its collection becomes quite near impossible, albeit nonetheless important. In “Play With Data – An Exploration of Play Analytics and Its Effect on Player Experiences,” Ben Medler explains its pertinence: “Data can be given a different context through relating it to other data. A relation informs someone of how data can be correlated or combined with other data.

Efficient Opportunistic Sensing using Mobile Collaborative Platform MOSDEN

Mobile devices are rapidly becoming the primary computing device in people's lives. Application delivery platforms like Google Play, Apple App Store have transformed mobile phones into intelligent computing devices by the means of applications that can be downloaded and installed instantly. Many of these applications take advantage of the plethora of sensors installed on the mobile device to deliver enhanced user experience. The sensors on the smartphone provide the opportunity to develop innovative mobile opportunistic sensing applications in many sectors including healthcare, environmental monitoring and transportation. In this paper, we present a collaborative mobile sensing framework namely Mobile Sensor Data EngiNe (MOSDEN) that can operate on smartphones capturing and sharing sensed data between multiple distributed applications and users. MOSDEN follows a component-based design philosophy promoting reuse for easy and quick opportunistic sensing application deployments. MOSDEN separates the application-specific processing from the sensing, storing and sharing. MOSDEN is scalable and requires minimal development effort from the application developer. We have implemented our framework on Android-based mobile platforms and evaluate its performance to validate the feasibility and efficiency of MOSDEN to operate collaboratively in mobile opportunistic sensing applications. Experimental outcomes and lessons learnt conclude the paper

MOSDEN: A Scalable Mobile Collaborative Platform for Opportunistic Sensing Applications

Mobile smartphones along with embedded sensors have become an efficient enabler for various mobile applications including opportunistic sensing. The hi-tech advances in smartphones are opening up a world of possibilities. This paper proposes a mobile collaborative platform called MOSDEN that enables and supports opportunistic sensing at run time. MOSDEN captures and shares sensor data across multiple apps, smartphones and users. MOSDEN supports the emerging trend of separating sensors from application-specific processing, storing and sharing. MOSDEN promotes reuse and re-purposing of sensor data hence reducing the efforts in developing novel opportunistic sensing applications. MOSDEN has been implemented on Android-based smartphones and tablets. Experimental evaluations validate the scalability and energy efficiency of MOSDEN and its suitability towards real world applications. The results of evaluation and lessons learned are presented and discussed in this paper.Comment: Accepted to be published in Transactions on Collaborative Computing, 2014. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1310.405

Exploring Choreographers’ Conceptions of Motion Capture for Full Body Interaction

We present the results of a group interview of choreographers aimed at understanding their conceptions of how movement can be used to in live performance. This understanding intended to inform research into full body interaction for live performance and other more general full body interfaces. The results of the interview suggest a new way of conceiving of interaction with digital technology, neither as a representation of movement, not as an interface that responds to movement but as a means of transforming movement. This transformed movement can then serve as a starting point for a dancers responses to transformations of their own movement thus setting up an improvisational feedback loop

A Sign Language to Text Converter Using Leap Motion

This paper presents a prototype that can convert sign language into text. A Leap Motion controller was utilised as an interface for hand motion tracking without the need of wearing any external instruments. Three recognition techniques were employed to measure the performance of the prototype, namely the Geometric Template Matching, Artificial Neural Network and Cross Correlation. 26 alphabets from American Sign Language were chosen for training and testing the proposed prototype. The experimental results showed that Geometric Template Matching achieved the highest recognition accuracy compared to the other recognition techniques

Situating approaches to museum guides for families and groups

In this paper, we analyze the current state of museum guide technologies and applications in order to develop an analytical foundation for our future research in an adaptive museum guide for families. We have focused our analysis on three critical areas of interest in considering group and social interaction in museums: tangibility, the role of tangible user interfaces; interaction, visit types and visit flows; adaptivity, user modeling approaches

Educational Scaffolding for Students Stuck in a Virtual World

Virtual worlds provide students with educational opportunities to explore and have experiences that are difficult to provide in reality. However, ensuring that students stay motivated and on task is important if the learning goals are to be achieved. Building on the findings of previous studies involving agent-based virtual worlds, adaptive collaborative learning and intelligent agents, we have designed an empathic intelligent virtual agent that provides educational scaffolding to encourage and support the students to understand what they are learning with less frustration. We have identified models of ‘stuck’ behaviour and corresponding empathic response patterns that we have incorporated into the behaviours of the intelligent virtual agents in the XXX Virtual World for science inquiry

Computational Abstraction of Films for Quantitave Analysis of Cinematography

Currently, film viewers’ options for getting objective information about films before watching them, are limited. Comparisons are even harder to find and often require extensive film knowledge both by the author and the reader. Such comparisons are inherently subjective, therefore they limit the possibilities for scalable and effective statistical analyses. Apart from trailers, information about films cannot reach viewers audibly or visibly, which seems absurd considering the very nature of film. The thesis examines repeatable quantification methods for computationally abstracting films in order to extract informative data for visualizations and further statistical analy- ses. Theoretical background empowered by multidisciplinary approach and design processes are described. Visualizations of analyses are provided and evaluated for their accuracy and efficiency. Throughout the thesis foundations for the future automated quantification player/plugin, are described aiming to facilitate further developments. Theoretical structures of the website which may act as a gateway that collects and provides data for statistical cinematic research are also discussed

A Comprehensive Analysis of Literature Reported Mac and Phy Enhancements of Zigbee and its Alliances

Wireless communication is one of the most required technologies by the common man. The strength of this technology is rigorously progressing towards several novel directions in establishing personal wireless networks mounted over on low power consuming systems. The cutting-edge communication technologies like bluetooth, WIFI and ZigBee significantly play a prime role to cater the basic needs of any individual. ZigBee is one such evolutionary technology steadily getting its popularity in establishing personal wireless networks which is built on small and low-power digital radios. Zigbee defines the physical and MAC layers built on IEEE standard. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of literature reported MAC and PHY enhancements of ZigBee and its contemporary technologies with respect to performance, power consumption, scheduling, resource management and timing and address binding. The work also discusses on the areas of ZigBee MAC and PHY towards their design for specific applications