Space for Two to Think: Large, High-Resolution Displays for Co-located Collaborative Sensemaking

Large, high-resolution displays carry the potential to enhance single display groupware collaborative sensemaking for intelligence analysis tasks by providing space for common ground to develop, but it is up to the visual analytics tools to utilize this space effectively. In an exploratory study, we compared two tools (Jigsaw and a document viewer), which were adapted to support multiple input devices, to observe how the large display space was used in establishing and maintaining common ground during an intelligence analysis scenario using 50 textual documents. We discuss the spatial strategies employed by the pairs of participants, which were largely dependent on tool type (data-centric or function-centric), as well as how different visual analytics tools used collaboratively on large, high-resolution displays impact common ground in both process and solution. Using these findings, we suggest design considerations to enable future co-located collaborative sensemaking tools to take advantage of the benefits of collaborating on large, high-resolution displays

Large High Resolution Displays for Co-Located Collaborative Intelligence Analysis

Large, high-resolution vertical displays carry the potential to increase the accuracy of collaborative sensemaking, given correctly designed visual analytics tools. From an exploratory user study using a fictional intelligence analysis task, we investigated how users interact with the display to construct spatial schemas and externalize information, as well as how they establish shared and private territories. We investigated the spatial strategies of users partitioned by tool type used (document- or entity-centric). We classified the types of territorial behavior exhibited in terms of how the users interacted with the display (integrated or independent workspaces). Next, we examined how territorial behavior impacted the common ground between the pairs of users. Finally, we recommend design guidelines for building co-located collaborative visual analytics tools specifically for use on large, high-resolution vertical displays

Augmenting Pathologists with NaviPath: Design and Evaluation of a Human-AI Collaborative Navigation System

Artificial Intelligence (AI) brings advancements to support pathologists in navigating high-resolution tumor images to search for pathology patterns of interest. However, existing AI-assisted tools have not realized this promised potential due to a lack of insight into pathology and HCI considerations for pathologists' navigation workflows in practice. We first conducted a formative study with six medical professionals in pathology to capture their navigation strategies. By incorporating our observations along with the pathologists' domain knowledge, we designed NaviPath -- a human-AI collaborative navigation system. An evaluation study with 15 medical professionals in pathology indicated that: (i) compared to the manual navigation, participants saw more than twice the number of pathological patterns in unit time with NaviPath, and (ii) participants achieved higher precision and recall against the AI and the manual navigation on average. Further qualitative analysis revealed that navigation was more consistent with NaviPath, which can improve the overall examination quality.Comment: Accepted ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '23

Designing Individualized Policy and Technology Interventions to Improve Gig Work Conditions

The gig economy is characterized by short-term contract work completed by independent workers who are paid to perform "gigs", and who have control over when, whether and how they conduct work. Gig economy platforms (e.g., Uber, Lyft, Instacart) offer workers increased job opportunities, lower barriers to entry, and improved flexibility. However, growing evidence suggests that worker well-being and gig work conditions have become significant societal issues. In designing public-facing policies and technologies for improving gig work conditions, inherent tradeoffs exist between offering individual flexibility and when attempting to meet all community needs. In platform-based gig work, contractors pursue the flexibility of short-term tasks, but policymakers resist segmenting the population when designing policies to support their work. As platforms offer an ever-increasing variety of services, we argue that policymakers and platform designers must provide more targeted and personalized policies, benefits, and protections for platform-based workers, so that they can lead more successful and sustainable gig work careers. We present in this paper relevant legal and scholarly evidence from the United States to support this position, and make recommendations for future innovations in policy and technology

Painterly rendering techniques: A state-of-the-art review of current approaches

In this publication we will look at the different methods presented over the past few decades which attempt to recreate digital paintings. While previous surveys concentrate on the broader subject of non-photorealistic rendering, the focus of this paper is firmly placed on painterly rendering techniques. We compare different methods used to produce different output painting styles such as abstract, colour pencil, watercolour, oriental, oil and pastel. Whereas some methods demand a high level of interaction using a skilled artist, others require simple parameters provided by a user with little or no artistic experience. Many methods attempt to provide more automation with the use of varying forms of reference data. This reference data can range from still photographs, video, 3D polygonal meshes or even 3D point clouds. The techniques presented here endeavour to provide tools and styles that are not traditionally available to an artist. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd

The Challenges in Modeling Human Performance in 3D Space with Fitts’ Law

With the rapid growth in virtual reality technologies, object interaction is becoming increasingly more immersive, elucidating human perception and leading to promising directions towards evaluating human performance under different settings. This spike in technological growth exponentially increased the need for a human performance metric in 3D space. Fitts' law is perhaps the most widely used human prediction model in HCI history attempting to capture human movement in lower dimensions. Despite the collective effort towards deriving an advanced extension of a 3D human performance model based on Fitts' law, a standardized metric is still missing. Moreover, most of the extensions to date assume or limit their findings to certain settings, effectively disregarding important variables that are fundamental to 3D object interaction. In this review, we investigate and analyze the most prominent extensions of Fitts' law and compare their characteristics pinpointing to potentially important aspects for deriving a higher-dimensional performance model. Lastly, we mention the complexities, frontiers as well as potential challenges that may lay ahead.Comment: Accepted at ACM CHI 2021 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '21 Extended Abstracts

Scim: Intelligent Skimming Support for Scientific Papers

Researchers need to keep up with immense literatures, though it is time-consuming and difficult to do so. In this paper, we investigate the role that intelligent interfaces can play in helping researchers skim papers, that is, rapidly reviewing a paper to attain a cursory understanding of its contents. After conducting formative interviews and a design probe, we suggest that skimming aids should aim to thread the needle of highlighting content that is simultaneously diverse, evenly-distributed, and important. We introduce Scim, a novel intelligent skimming interface that reifies this aim, designed to support the skimming process by highlighting salient paper contents to direct a skimmer's focus. Key to the design is that the highlights are faceted by content type, evenly-distributed across a paper, with a density configurable by readers at both the global and local level. We evaluate Scim with an in-lab usability study and deployment study, revealing how skimming aids can support readers throughout the skimming experience and yielding design considerations and tensions for the design of future intelligent skimming tools

Reference face graph for face recognition

Face recognition has been studied extensively; however, real-world face recognition still remains a challenging task. The demand for unconstrained practical face recognition is rising with the explosion of online multimedia such as social networks, and video surveillance footage where face analysis is of significant importance. In this paper, we approach face recognition in the context of graph theory. We recognize an unknown face using an external reference face graph (RFG). An RFG is generated and recognition of a given face is achieved by comparing it to the faces in the constructed RFG. Centrality measures are utilized to identify distinctive faces in the reference face graph. The proposed RFG-based face recognition algorithm is robust to the changes in pose and it is also alignment free. The RFG recognition is used in conjunction with DCT locality sensitive hashing for efficient retrieval to ensure scalability. Experiments are conducted on several publicly available databases and the results show that the proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods without any preprocessing necessities such as face alignment. Due to the richness in the reference set construction, the proposed method can also handle illumination and expression variation