2,907 research outputs found
Semi-Automated SVG Programming via Direct Manipulation
Direct manipulation interfaces provide intuitive and interactive features to
a broad range of users, but they often exhibit two limitations: the built-in
features cannot possibly cover all use cases, and the internal representation
of the content is not readily exposed. We believe that if direct manipulation
interfaces were to (a) use general-purpose programs as the representation
format, and (b) expose those programs to the user, then experts could customize
these systems in powerful new ways and non-experts could enjoy some of the
benefits of programmable systems.
In recent work, we presented a prototype SVG editor called Sketch-n-Sketch
that offered a step towards this vision. In that system, the user wrote a
program in a general-purpose lambda-calculus to generate a graphic design and
could then directly manipulate the output to indirectly change design
parameters (i.e. constant literals) in the program in real-time during the
manipulation. Unfortunately, the burden of programming the desired
relationships rested entirely on the user.
In this paper, we design and implement new features for Sketch-n-Sketch that
assist in the programming process itself. Like typical direct manipulation
systems, our extended Sketch-n-Sketch now provides GUI-based tools for drawing
shapes, relating shapes to each other, and grouping shapes together. Unlike
typical systems, however, each tool carries out the user's intention by
transforming their general-purpose program. This novel, semi-automated
programming workflow allows the user to rapidly create high-level, reusable
abstractions in the program while at the same time retaining direct
manipulation capabilities. In future work, our approach may be extended with
more graphic design features or realized for other application domains.Comment: In 29th ACM User Interface Software and Technology Symposium (UIST
2016
Stochastic Dynamics for Video Infilling
In this paper, we introduce a stochastic dynamics video infilling (SDVI)
framework to generate frames between long intervals in a video. Our task
differs from video interpolation which aims to produce transitional frames for
a short interval between every two frames and increase the temporal resolution.
Our task, namely video infilling, however, aims to infill long intervals with
plausible frame sequences. Our framework models the infilling as a constrained
stochastic generation process and sequentially samples dynamics from the
inferred distribution. SDVI consists of two parts: (1) a bi-directional
constraint propagation module to guarantee the spatial-temporal coherence among
frames, (2) a stochastic sampling process to generate dynamics from the
inferred distributions. Experimental results show that SDVI can generate clear
frame sequences with varying contents. Moreover, motions in the generated
sequence are realistic and able to transfer smoothly from the given start frame
to the terminal frame. Our project site is
https://xharlie.github.io/projects/project_sites/SDVI/video_results.htmlComment: Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV 2020
Programmatic and Direct Manipulation, Together at Last
Direct manipulation interfaces and programmatic systems have distinct and
complementary strengths. The former provide intuitive, immediate visual
feedback and enable rapid prototyping, whereas the latter enable complex,
reusable abstractions. Unfortunately, existing systems typically force users
into just one of these two interaction modes.
We present a system called Sketch-n-Sketch that integrates programmatic and
direct manipulation for the particular domain of Scalable Vector Graphics
(SVG). In Sketch-n-Sketch, the user writes a program to generate an output SVG
canvas. Then the user may directly manipulate the canvas while the system
immediately infers a program update in order to match the changes to the
output, a workflow we call live synchronization. To achieve this, we propose
(i) a technique called trace-based program synthesis that takes program
execution history into account in order to constrain the search space and (ii)
heuristics for dealing with ambiguities. Based on our experience with examples
spanning 2,000 lines of code and from the results of a preliminary user study,
we believe that Sketch-n-Sketch provides a novel workflow that can augment
traditional programming systems. Our approach may serve as the basis for live
synchronization in other application domains, as well as a starting point for
yet more ambitious ways of combining programmatic and direct manipulation.Comment: PLDI 2016 Paper + Supplementary Appendice
Inferring Termination Conditions for Logic Programs using Backwards Analysis
This paper focuses on the inference of modes for which a logic program is
guaranteed to terminate. This generalises traditional termination analysis
where an analyser tries to verify termination for a specified mode. Our
contribution is a methodology in which components of traditional termination
analysis are combined with backwards analysis to obtain an analyser for
termination inference. We identify a condition on the components of the
analyser which guarantees that termination inference will infer all modes which
can be checked to terminate. The application of this methodology to enhance a
traditional termination analyser to perform also termination inference is
demonstrated
A new model to predict weak-lensing peak counts II. Parameter constraint strategies
Peak counts have been shown to be an excellent tool to extract the
non-Gaussian part of the weak lensing signal. Recently, we developped a fast
stochastic forward model to predict weak-lensing peak counts. Our model is able
to reconstruct the underlying distribution of observables for analyses. In this
work, we explore and compare various strategies for constraining parameter
using our model, focusing on the matter density and the
density fluctuation amplitude . First, we examine the impact from the
cosmological dependency of covariances (CDC). Second, we perform the analysis
with the copula likelihood, a technique which makes a weaker assumption
compared to the Gaussian likelihood. Third, direct, non-analytic parameter
estimations are applied using the full information of the distribution. Fourth,
we obtain constraints with approximate Bayesian computation (ABC), an
efficient, robust, and likelihood-free algorithm based on accept-reject
sampling. We find that neglecting the CDC effect enlarges parameter contours by
22%, and that the covariance-varying copula likelihood is a very good
approximation to the true likelihood. The direct techniques work well in spite
of noisier contours. Concerning ABC, the iterative process converges quickly to
a posterior distribution that is in an excellent agreement with results from
our other analyses. The time cost for ABC is reduced by two orders of
magnitude. The stochastic nature of our weak-lensing peak count model allows us
to use various techniques that approach the true underlying probability
distribution of observables, without making simplifying assumptions. Our work
can be generalized to other observables where forward simulations provide
samples of the underlying distribution.Comment: 15 pages, 11 figures. Accepted versio
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