Experiences of aiding autobiographical memory Using the SenseCam

Human memory is a dynamic system that makes accessible certain memories of events based on a hierarchy of information, arguably driven by personal significance. Not all events are remembered, but those that are tend to be more psychologically relevant. In contrast, lifelogging is the process of automatically recording aspects of one's life in digital form without loss of information. In this article we share our experiences in designing computer-based solutions to assist people review their visual lifelogs and address this contrast. The technical basis for our work is automatically segmenting visual lifelogs into events, allowing event similarity and event importance to be computed, ideas that are motivated by cognitive science considerations of how human memory works and can be assisted. Our work has been based on visual lifelogs gathered by dozens of people, some of them with collections spanning multiple years. In this review article we summarize a series of studies that have led to the development of a browser that is based on human memory systems and discuss the inherent tension in storing large amounts of data but making the most relevant material the most accessible

Experiences of aiding autobiographical memory using the sensecam

Human memory is a dynamic system that makes accessible certain memories of events based on a hierarchy of information, arguably driven by personal significance. Not all events are remembered, but those that are tend to be more psychologically relevant. In contrast, lifelogging is the process of automatically recording aspects of one's life in digital form without loss of information. In this article we share our experiences in designing computer-based solutions to assist people review their visual lifelogs and address this contrast. The technical basis for our work is automatically segmenting visual lifelogs into events, allowing event similarity and event importance to be computed, ideas that are motivated by cognitive science considerations of how human memory works and can be assisted. Our work has been based on visual lifelogs gathered by dozens of people, some of them with collections spanning multiple years. In this review article we summarize a series of studies that have led to the development of a browser that is based on human memory systems and discuss the inherent tension in storing large amounts of data but making the most relevant material the most accessible

A Survey on Soft Biometrics for Human Identification

The focus has been changed to multi-biometrics due to the security demands. The ancillary information extracted from primary biometric (face and body) traits such as facial measurements, gender, color of the skin, ethnicity, and height is called soft biometrics and can be integrated to improve the speed and overall system performance of a primary biometric system (e.g., fuse face with facial marks) or to generate human semantic interpretation description (qualitative) of a person and limit the search in the whole dataset when using gender and ethnicity (e.g., old African male with blue eyes) in a fusion framework. This chapter provides a holistic survey on soft biometrics that show major works while focusing on facial soft biometrics and discusses some of the features of extraction and classification techniques that have been proposed and show their strengths and limitations

Looking at the Lanham Act: Images in Trademark and Advertising Law

Words are the prototypical regulatory subjects for trademark and advertising law, despite our increasingly audiovisual economy. This word-focused baseline means that the Lanham Act often misconceives its object, resulting in confusion and incoherence. This Article explores some of the ways courts have attempted to fit images into a word-centric model, while not fully recognizing the particular ways in which images make meaning in trademark and other forms of advertising. While problems interpreting images are likely to persist, this Article suggests some ways in which courts could pay closer attention to the special features of images as compared to words

CardioCam: Leveraging Camera on Mobile Devices to Verify Users While Their Heart is Pumping

With the increasing prevalence of mobile and IoT devices (e.g., smartphones, tablets, smart-home appliances), massive private and sensitive information are stored on these devices. To prevent unauthorized access on these devices, existing user verification solutions either rely on the complexity of user-defined secrets (e.g., password) or resort to specialized biometric sensors (e.g., fingerprint reader), but the users may still suffer from various attacks, such as password theft, shoulder surfing, smudge, and forged biometrics attacks. In this paper, we propose, CardioCam, a low-cost, general, hard-to-forge user verification system leveraging the unique cardiac biometrics extracted from the readily available built-in cameras in mobile and IoT devices. We demonstrate that the unique cardiac features can be extracted from the cardiac motion patterns in fingertips, by pressing on the built-in camera. To mitigate the impacts of various ambient lighting conditions and human movements under practical scenarios, CardioCam develops a gradient-based technique to optimize the camera configuration, and dynamically selects the most sensitive pixels in a camera frame to extract reliable cardiac motion patterns. Furthermore, the morphological characteristic analysis is deployed to derive user-specific cardiac features, and a feature transformation scheme grounded on Principle Component Analysis (PCA) is developed to enhance the robustness of cardiac biometrics for effective user verification. With the prototyped system, extensive experiments involving 25 subjects are conducted to demonstrate that CardioCam can achieve effective and reliable user verification with over 99% average true positive rate (TPR) while maintaining the false positive rate (FPR) as low as 4%

The Constructive Role of Confusion in Trademark

This Article argues that consumer confusion plays a pervasive and important role in our trademark system. This argument directly challenges well-established orthodoxy. Numerous Supreme Court opinions and leading academics take the position that trademark law exists to reduce consumer confusion as much as possible. Indeed, courts generally justify aggressive creation and enforcement of trademark rights on the ground that these rights reduce consumer confusion or its economic equivalent, consumer search costs. Unfortunately, this construction of trademark law rests on a fundamental misunderstanding about how consumer confusion, the trademark system, and the operation of markets relate to one another. In particular, trademark orthodoxy considers consumer confusion always harmful. Aggressive elimination of even modest confusion therefore improves our trademark system and, by extension, the operation of markets because such modest confusion hinders the ability of consumers to find the goods they want. Two observations expose the inaccuracy of this orthodoxy. First, trademark law frequently accepts, creates, and even promotes the very sort of modest confusion that trademark orthodoxy despises. The ubiquitous presence of this confusion suggests that consumers should find their preferences seriously disrupted, but consumers generally find the goods they prefer without undue difficulty. Accordingly, it appears that modest confusion does not disrupt markets as badly as trademark orthodoxy states. Second, and more importantly, there is ample reason to think that low-level, modest confusion actually helps consumers avoid confusion by teaching them to identify and distinguish trademarks more effectively. Indeed, consumer research suggests that exposure to confusion spurs consumers to develop and implement cognitive strategies that avoid confusion and that consumers become more and more adept at using these strategies over time. This shows that trademark theory should change to embrace, and even encourage, low levels of modest confusion in order to improve consumer abilities and, by extension, the operation of the trademark system itself