Contex-aware gestures for mixed-initiative text editings UIs

This is a pre-copyedited, author-produced PDF of an article accepted for publication in Interacting with computers following peer review. The version of record is available online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/iwc/iwu019[EN] This work is focused on enhancing highly interactive text-editing applications with gestures. Concretely, we study Computer Assisted Transcription of Text Images (CATTI), a handwriting transcription system that follows a corrective feedback paradigm, where both the user and the system collaborate efficiently to produce a high-quality text transcription. CATTI-like applications demand fast and accurate gesture recognition, for which we observed that current gesture recognizers are not adequate enough. In response to this need we developed MinGestures, a parametric context-aware gesture recognizer. Our contributions include a number of stroke features for disambiguating copy-mark gestures from handwritten text, plus the integration of these gestures in a CATTI application. It becomes finally possible to create highly interactive stroke-based text-editing interfaces, without worrying to verify the user intent on-screen. We performed a formal evaluation with 22 e-pen users and 32 mouse users using a gesture vocabulary of 10 symbols. MinGestures achieved an outstanding accuracy (<1% error rate) with very high performance (<1 ms of recognition time). We then integrated MinGestures in a CATTI prototype and tested the performance of the interactive handwriting system when it is driven by gestures. Our results show that using gestures in interactive handwriting applications is both advantageous and convenient when gestures are simple but context-aware. Taken together, this work suggests that text-editing interfaces not only can be easily augmented with simple gestures, but also may substantially improve user productivity.This work has been supported by the European Commission through the 7th Framework Program (tranScriptorium: FP7- ICT-2011-9, project 600707 and CasMaCat: FP7-ICT-2011-7, project 287576). It has also been supported by the Spanish MINECO under grant TIN2012-37475-C02-01 (STraDa), and the Generalitat Valenciana under grant ISIC/2012/004 (AMIIS).Leiva, LA.; Alabau, V.; Romero Gómez, V.; Toselli, AH.; Vidal, E. (2015). Contex-aware gestures for mixed-initiative text editings UIs. Interacting with Computers. 27(6):675-696. https://doi.org/10.1093/iwc/iwu019S675696276Alabau V. Leiva L. A. Transcribing Handwritten Text Images with a Word Soup Game. Proc. Extended Abstr. Hum. Factors Comput. Syst. (CHI EA) 2012.Alabau V. Rodríguez-Ruiz L. Sanchis A. Martínez-Gómez P. Casacuberta F. 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Robust density modelling using the student's t-distribution for human action recognition

The extraction of human features from videos is often inaccurate and prone to outliers. Such outliers can severely affect density modelling when the Gaussian distribution is used as the model since it is highly sensitive to outliers. The Gaussian distribution is also often used as base component of graphical models for recognising human actions in the videos (hidden Markov model and others) and the presence of outliers can significantly affect the recognition accuracy. In contrast, the Student's t-distribution is more robust to outliers and can be exploited to improve the recognition rate in the presence of abnormal data. In this paper, we present an HMM which uses mixtures of t-distributions as observation probabilities and show how experiments over two well-known datasets (Weizmann, MuHAVi) reported a remarkable improvement in classification accuracy. © 2011 IEEE

Multimodal interaction with mobile devices : fusing a broad spectrum of modality combinations

This dissertation presents a multimodal architecture for use in mobile scenarios such as shopping and navigation. It also analyses a wide range of feasible modality input combinations for these contexts. For this purpose, two interlinked demonstrators were designed for stand-alone use on mobile devices. Of particular importance was the design and implementation of a modality fusion module capable of combining input from a range of communication modes like speech, handwriting, and gesture. The implementation is able to account for confidence value biases arising within and between modalities and also provides a method for resolving semantically overlapped input. Tangible interaction with real-world objects and symmetric multimodality are two further themes addressed in this work. The work concludes with the results from two usability field studies that provide insight on user preference and modality intuition for different modality combinations, as well as user acceptance for anthropomorphized objects.Diese Dissertation präsentiert eine multimodale Architektur zum Gebrauch in mobilen Umständen wie z. B. Einkaufen und Navigation. Außerdem wird ein großes Gebiet von möglichen modalen Eingabekombinationen zu diesen Umständen analysiert. Um das in praktischer Weise zu demonstrieren, wurden zwei teilweise gekoppelte Vorführungsprogramme zum \u27stand-alone\u27; Gebrauch auf mobilen Geräten entworfen. Von spezieller Wichtigkeit war der Entwurf und die Ausführung eines Modalitäts-fusion Modul, das die Kombination einer Reihe von Kommunikationsarten wie Sprache, Handschrift und Gesten ermöglicht. Die Ausführung erlaubt die Veränderung von Zuverlässigkeitswerten innerhalb einzelner Modalitäten und außerdem ermöglicht eine Methode um die semantisch überlappten Eingaben auszuwerten. Wirklichkeitsnaher Dialog mit aktuellen Objekten und symmetrische Multimodalität sind zwei weitere Themen die in dieser Arbeit behandelt werden. Die Arbeit schließt mit Resultaten von zwei Feldstudien, die weitere Einsicht erlauben über die bevorzugte Art verschiedener Modalitätskombinationen, sowie auch über die Akzeptanz von anthropomorphisierten Objekten

Multimodal interaction with mobile devices : fusing a broad spectrum of modality combinations

This dissertation presents a multimodal architecture for use in mobile scenarios such as shopping and navigation. It also analyses a wide range of feasible modality input combinations for these contexts. For this purpose, two interlinked demonstrators were designed for stand-alone use on mobile devices. Of particular importance was the design and implementation of a modality fusion module capable of combining input from a range of communication modes like speech, handwriting, and gesture. The implementation is able to account for confidence value biases arising within and between modalities and also provides a method for resolving semantically overlapped input. Tangible interaction with real-world objects and symmetric multimodality are two further themes addressed in this work. The work concludes with the results from two usability field studies that provide insight on user preference and modality intuition for different modality combinations, as well as user acceptance for anthropomorphized objects.Diese Dissertation präsentiert eine multimodale Architektur zum Gebrauch in mobilen Umständen wie z. B. Einkaufen und Navigation. Außerdem wird ein großes Gebiet von möglichen modalen Eingabekombinationen zu diesen Umständen analysiert. Um das in praktischer Weise zu demonstrieren, wurden zwei teilweise gekoppelte Vorführungsprogramme zum 'stand-alone'; Gebrauch auf mobilen Geräten entworfen. Von spezieller Wichtigkeit war der Entwurf und die Ausführung eines Modalitäts-fusion Modul, das die Kombination einer Reihe von Kommunikationsarten wie Sprache, Handschrift und Gesten ermöglicht. Die Ausführung erlaubt die Veränderung von Zuverlässigkeitswerten innerhalb einzelner Modalitäten und außerdem ermöglicht eine Methode um die semantisch überlappten Eingaben auszuwerten. Wirklichkeitsnaher Dialog mit aktuellen Objekten und symmetrische Multimodalität sind zwei weitere Themen die in dieser Arbeit behandelt werden. Die Arbeit schließt mit Resultaten von zwei Feldstudien, die weitere Einsicht erlauben über die bevorzugte Art verschiedener Modalitätskombinationen, sowie auch über die Akzeptanz von anthropomorphisierten Objekten

Autonomous navigation and multi-sensorial real-time mocalization for a mobile robot

Doutoramento em Engenharia MecânicaO principio por detrás da proposta desta tese é a navegação de ambientes utilizando uma sequência de instruções condicionadas nas observações feitas pelo robô. Esta sequência é denominada como uma 'missão de navegação'. A interacção com um robô através de missões permitirá uma interface mais eficaz com humanos e a navegação de ambientes de maior escala e duma forma mais simplificada. No entanto, esta abordagem abre problemas novos no que diz respeito à forma como os dados sensoriais devem ser representados e utilizados. Neste trabalho representações binárias foram introduzidas para facilitar a integração dos dados multi-sensoriais, a dimensionalidade da qual foi reduzida através da utilização de Misturas de Distribuições de tipo Bernoulli. Foi também aplicada a técnica de cadeias de Markov ocultas (Hidden Markov Models), que contou com o desenvolvimento e a utilização dum modelo de cadeia de Markov original, esta que consegue explorar a informação contextual da sequência da missão. Uma aplicação que surgiu da aplicação do método de localização foi a criação de representações topologicas do ambiente sem ter que previamente recorrer à criação de mapas geométricos. Outras contribuições incluem a aplicação de métodos para a extracção de propriedades locais em imagens e o desenvolvimento de propriedades extraídas a partir de varrimentos dum medidor de distancia laser.This thesis evaluates the requisites for the specification of mobile robot 'Missions' for navigation within environments that are typically used by human beings. The principal idea behind the proposal of this thesis was to allow localization and navigation by providing a sequence of instructions, the execution of each instruction being conditional on the expected sensor data. This approach to navigation is expected to lead to new applications which will include the autonomous navigation of environments of very large scale. It is also expected to lead to a more intuitive interaction between mobile robots and humans. However, the concept of the navigation Mission opens up new problems namely in the way in which the sequence of instructions and the expected observations are to be represented. To solve this problem, binary features were used to integrate observations from multiple sensors, the dimensionality of which was reduced by modelling the binary data as a Finite Mixture Model comprised of Bernoulli distributions. Another original contribution was the modification of the Markov Chains used in Hidden Markov Models to enable the use of the sequential context in which the expected observations are specified in the navigation Mission. The localization method that was developed enabled the direct creation of a topological representation of an environment without recourse to an intermediate geometric map. Other contributions include developments that were made in the characterisation of images through the application of local features and of laser range scans through the creation of original features based on the scan contour and free-area properties

Uncovering the myth of learning to read Chinese characters: phonetic, semantic, and orthographic strategies used by Chinese as foreign language learners

Oral Session - 6A: Lexical modeling: no. 6A.3Chinese is considered to be one of the most challenging orthographies to be learned by non-native speakers, in particular, the character. Chinese character is the basic reading unit that converges sound, form and meaning. The predominant type of Chinese character is semantic-phonetic compound that is composed of phonetic and semantic radicals, giving the clues of the sound and meaning, respectively. Over the last two decades, psycholinguistic research has made significant progress in specifying the roles of phonetic and semantic radicals in character processing among native Chinese speakers …postprin

Recent Advances in Signal Processing

The signal processing task is a very critical issue in the majority of new technological inventions and challenges in a variety of applications in both science and engineering fields. Classical signal processing techniques have largely worked with mathematical models that are linear, local, stationary, and Gaussian. They have always favored closed-form tractability over real-world accuracy. These constraints were imposed by the lack of powerful computing tools. During the last few decades, signal processing theories, developments, and applications have matured rapidly and now include tools from many areas of mathematics, computer science, physics, and engineering. This book is targeted primarily toward both students and researchers who want to be exposed to a wide variety of signal processing techniques and algorithms. It includes 27 chapters that can be categorized into five different areas depending on the application at hand. These five categories are ordered to address image processing, speech processing, communication systems, time-series analysis, and educational packages respectively. The book has the advantage of providing a collection of applications that are completely independent and self-contained; thus, the interested reader can choose any chapter and skip to another without losing continuity