EyeSpot: leveraging gaze to protect private text content on mobile devices from shoulder surfing

As mobile devices allow access to an increasing amount of private data, using them in public can potentially leak sensitive information through shoulder surfing. This includes personal private data (e.g., in chat conversations) and business-related content (e.g., in emails). Leaking the former might infringe on users’ privacy, while leaking the latter is considered a breach of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation as of May 2018. This creates a need for systems that protect sensitive data in public. We introduce EyeSpot, a technique that displays content through a spot that follows the user’s gaze while hiding the rest of the screen from an observer’s view through overlaid masks. We explore different configurations for EyeSpot in a user study in terms of users’ reading speed, text comprehension, and perceived workload. While our system is a proof of concept, we identify crystallized masks as a promising design candidate for further evaluation with regard to the security of the system in a shoulder surfing scenario

Investigating User Needs for Bio-sensing and Affective Wearables

Bio-sensing wearables are currently advancing to provide users with a lot of information about their physiological and affective states. However, relatively little is known about users' interest in acquiring, sharing and receiving this information and through which channels and modalities. To close this gap, we report on the results of an online survey (N=109) exploring principle aspects of the design space of wearables such as data types, contexts, feedback modalities and sharing behaviors. Results show that users are interested in obtaining physiological, emotional and cognitive data through modalities beyond traditional touchscreen output. Valence of the information, whether positive or negative affects the sharing behaviors

GazeTouchPass: Multimodal Authentication Using Gaze and Touch on Mobile Devices

We propose a multimodal scheme, GazeTouchPass, that combines gaze and touch for shoulder-surfing resistant user authentication on mobile devices. GazeTouchPass allows passwords with multiple switches between input modalities during authentication. This requires attackers to simultaneously observe the device screen and the user's eyes to find the password. We evaluate the security and usability of GazeTouchPass in two user studies. Our findings show that GazeTouchPass is usable and significantly more secure than single-modal authentication against basic and even advanced shoulder-surfing attacks

Sacramento River Predator Diet Analysis: A Comparative Study

This study examined diets of two predatory fish species, the native Sacramento Pikeminnow (Ptychocheilus grandis) and the introduced Striped Bass (Morone saxatilis), in the Sacramento River, California, USA. Both species have been implicated in native species declines through predation, eliciting our investigation of their diets in the Sacramento River. Sampling occurred between March and November 2017, and was conducted via hook and line on a 35-km reach near Chico, California. Habitat types sampled include engineered structures (water diversions and beam bridges), rip-rapped channel edges, and natural riverbank. Stomach contents were collected via gastric lavage and later processed using visual, gravimetric, and genetic techniques. Diets of Sacramento Pikeminnow and Striped Bass were highly similar as determined through index of relative importance and PERMANOVA modeling. Water temperature was the only variable that significantly affected diet composition. Results reflect similar dietary niches for both species in the Sacramento River

Forget-me-not: History-less Mobile Messaging

Text messaging has long been a popular activity, and today smartphone apps enable users to choose from a plethora of mobile messaging applications. While we know a lot about SMS practices, we know less about practices of messaging applications. In this paper, we take a first step to explore one ubiquitous aspect of mobile messaging – messaging history. We designed, built, and trialled a mobile messaging application without history—named forget-me-not. The two-week trial showed that history-less messaging no longer supports chit-chat as seen in e.g. WhatsApp, but is still considered conversational and more ‘engaging’. Participants expressed being lenient and relaxed about what they wrote. Removing the history allowed us to gain insights into what uses history has in other mobile messaging applications, such as planning events, allowing for distractions, and maintaining multiple conversation threads

An Empirical Study Comparing Unobtrusive Physiological Sensors for Stress Detection in Computer Work.

Several unobtrusive sensors have been tested in studies to capture physiological reactions to stress in workplace settings. Lab studies tend to focus on assessing sensors during a specific computer task, while in situ studies tend to offer a generalized view of sensors' efficacy for workplace stress monitoring, without discriminating different tasks. Given the variation in workplace computer activities, this study investigates the efficacy of unobtrusive sensors for stress measurement across a variety of tasks. We present a comparison of five physiological measurements obtained in a lab experiment, where participants completed six different computer tasks, while we measured their stress levels using a chest-band (ECG, respiration), a wristband (PPG and EDA), and an emerging thermal imaging method (perinasal perspiration). We found that thermal imaging can detect increased stress for most participants across all tasks, while wrist and chest sensors were less generalizable across tasks and participants. We summarize the costs and benefits of each sensor stream, and show how some computer use scenarios present usability and reliability challenges for stress monitoring with certain physiological sensors. We provide recommendations for researchers and system builders for measuring stress with physiological sensors during workplace computer use