Tangible user interfaces : past, present and future directions

In the last two decades, Tangible User Interfaces (TUIs) have emerged as a new interface type that interlinks the digital and physical worlds. Drawing upon users' knowledge and skills of interaction with the real non-digital world, TUIs show a potential to enhance the way in which people interact with and leverage digital information. However, TUI research is still in its infancy and extensive research is required in or- der to fully understand the implications of tangible user interfaces, to develop technologies that further bridge the digital and the physical, and to guide TUI design with empirical knowledge. This paper examines the existing body of work on Tangible User In- terfaces. We start by sketching the history of tangible user interfaces, examining the intellectual origins of this field. We then present TUIs in a broader context, survey application domains, and review frame- works and taxonomies. We also discuss conceptual foundations of TUIs including perspectives from cognitive sciences, phycology, and philoso- phy. Methods and technologies for designing, building, and evaluating TUIs are also addressed. Finally, we discuss the strengths and limita- tions of TUIs and chart directions for future research

Mapping Big Data into Knowledge Space with Cognitive Cyber-Infrastructure

Big data research has attracted great attention in science, technology, industry and society. It is developing with the evolving scientific paradigm, the fourth industrial revolution, and the transformational innovation of technologies. However, its nature and fundamental challenge have not been recognized, and its own methodology has not been formed. This paper explores and answers the following questions: What is big data? What are the basic methods for representing, managing and analyzing big data? What is the relationship between big data and knowledge? Can we find a mapping from big data into knowledge space? What kind of infrastructure is required to support not only big data management and analysis but also knowledge discovery, sharing and management? What is the relationship between big data and science paradigm? What is the nature and fundamental challenge of big data computing? A multi-dimensional perspective is presented toward a methodology of big data computing.Comment: 59 page

A Review of Platforms for the Development of Agent Systems

Agent-based computing is an active field of research with the goal of building autonomous software of hardware entities. This task is often facilitated by the use of dedicated, specialized frameworks. For almost thirty years, many such agent platforms have been developed. Meanwhile, some of them have been abandoned, others continue their development and new platforms are released. This paper presents a up-to-date review of the existing agent platforms and also a historical perspective of this domain. It aims to serve as a reference point for people interested in developing agent systems. This work details the main characteristics of the included agent platforms, together with links to specific projects where they have been used. It distinguishes between the active platforms and those no longer under development or with unclear status. It also classifies the agent platforms as general purpose ones, free or commercial, and specialized ones, which can be used for particular types of applications.Comment: 40 pages, 2 figures, 9 tables, 83 reference

An electronic architecture for mediating digital information in a hallway fac̦ade

Ubiquitous computing requires integration of physical space with digital information. This presents the challenges of integrating electronics, physical space, software and the interaction tools which can effectively communicate with the audience. Many research groups have embraced different techniques depending on location, context, space, and availability of necessary skills to make the world around us as an interface to the digital world. Encouraged by early successes and fostered by project undertaken by tangible visualization group. We introduce an architecture of Blades and Tiles for the development and realization of interactive wall surfaces. It provides an inexpensive, open-ended platform for constructing large-scale tangible and embedded interfaces. In this paper, we propose tiles built using inexpensive pegboards and a gateway for each of these tiles to provide access to digital information. The paper describes the architecture using a corridor fa\c{c}ade application. The corridor fa\c{c}ade uses full-spectrum LEDs, physical labels and stencils, and capacitive touch sensors to provide mediated representation, monitoring and querying of physical and digital content. Example contents include the physical and online status of people and the activity and dynamics of online research content repositories. Several complementary devices such as Microsoft PixelSense and smartdevices can support additional user interaction with the system. This enables interested people in synergistic physical environments to observe, explore, understand, and engage in ongoing activities and relationships. This paper describes the hardware architecture and software libraries employed and how they are used in our research center hallway and academic semester projects

A case study of reporting business KPIs of gaming data through static and interactive visualizations

Gaming companies, especially due to the high volume of ingame event logs, generate terabytes of data on a daily basis, which not only need to be distributed in fast and reliable access but also need to be aggregated and visualized in a timely and useful way to help the production engineers make data-driven improvements and bring business decisions. As such a high volume of data is created every day with an astonishing speed, it becomes highly challenging to process, aggregate and showcases the data in a supporting manner for business decision making. For that reason, business intelligence approaches like visualizations, in order to explore and analyse game-related data, need to find an optimal way of capturing the most out of such diverse and voluminous dataset both from a data perspective as well as from the point of view of the end-user. This, in reality, is a rather complex and many times a seemingly irrelevant job for companies that need to keep up anyhow with the daily income of the terabytes. As a result, companies not only end up having Key Performance Indicators visualized in the simplest forms of tables but also face the burden to store more data than needed in expensive data warehouses. In this thesis, we are going to propose a guideline for a business information visualization pipeline based on a practical use-case of a real-world gaming company. We present a pipeline that is not only built on top of the available data but also takes into consideration the cognitive processes involved in finding answers in visualizations and follows a task-driven structure. Furthermore, we are going to test which combination of view management and coordination helps better to deliver more accurate responses and a more acceptable system for decision making. The purpose is not only to create effective visualization and provide a guideline for a pipeline but to find bottlenecks and points of failure that have an indirect effect on the efficiency of the outcome. It is critical to search for latent points of failures to improve upon pipelines that are near to a highly efficient and effective visualization that serves business intelligence with high turnover