Examining the utility of affective response in search of personal lifelogs

Personal lifelog archives contain digital records captured from an individual’s daily life, for example emails, documents edited, webpages downloaded and photographs taken. While capturing this information is becoming increasingly easy, subsequently locating interesting items from within these archives is a significant challenge. One potential source of information to identify items of importance to an individual is their affective state during the capture of the information. The strength of an individual’s affective response to their current situation can often be gauged from their physiological response. For this study we explored the utility of the following biometric features to indicate significant items: galvanic skin response (GSR), heart rate (HR) and skin temperature (ST). Significant or important events tend to raise an individual’s arousal level, causing a measurable biometric response. We examined the utility of using biometric response to identify significant items and for re-ranking traditional information retrieval (IR) result sets. Results obtained indicate that skin temperature is most useful for extracting interesting items from personal archives containing passively captured images, computer activity and SMS messages

Enhancing Expressiveness of Speech through Animated Avatars for Instant Messaging and Mobile Phones

This thesis aims to create a chat program that allows users to communicate via an animated avatar that provides believable lip-synchronization and expressive emotion. Currently many avatars do not attempt to do lip-synchronization. Those that do are not well synchronized and have little or no emotional expression. Most avatars with lip synch use realistic looking 3D models or stylized rendering of complex models. This work utilizes images rendered in a cartoon style and lip-synchronization rules based on traditional animation. The cartoon style, as opposed to a more realistic look, makes the mouth motion more believable and the characters more appealing. The cartoon look and image-based animation (as opposed to a graphic model animated through manipulation of a skeleton or wireframe) also allows for fewer key frames resulting in faster speed with more room for expressiveness. When text is entered into the program, the Festival Text-to-Speech engine creates a speech file and extracts phoneme and phoneme duration data. Believable and fluid lip-synchronization is then achieved by means of a number of phoneme-to-image rules. Alternatively, phoneme and phoneme duration data can be obtained for speech dictated into a microphone using Microsoft SAPI and the CSLU Toolkit. Once lip synchronization has been completed, rules for non-verbal animation are added. Emotions are appended to the animation of speech in two ways: automatically, by recognition of key words and punctuation, or deliberately, by user-defined tags. Additionally, rules are defined for idle-time animation. Preliminary results indicate that the animated avatar program offers an improvement over currently available software. It aids in the understandability of speech, combines easily recognizable and expressive emotions with speech, and successfully enhances overall enjoyment of the chat experience. Applications for the program include use in cell phones for the deaf or hearing impaired, instant messaging, video conferencing, instructional software, and speech and animation synthesis

Spice up Your Chat: The Intentions and Sentiment Effects of Using Emoji

Emojis, as a new way of conveying nonverbal cues, are widely adopted in computer-mediated communications. In this paper, first from a message sender perspective, we focus on people's motives in using four types of emojis -- positive, neutral, negative, and non-facial. We compare the willingness levels of using these emoji types for seven typical intentions that people usually apply nonverbal cues for in communication. The results of extensive statistical hypothesis tests not only report the popularities of the intentions, but also uncover the subtle differences between emoji types in terms of intended uses. Second, from a perspective of message recipients, we further study the sentiment effects of emojis, as well as their duplications, on verbal messages. Different from previous studies in emoji sentiment, we study the sentiments of emojis and their contexts as a whole. The experiment results indicate that the powers of conveying sentiment are different between four emoji types, and the sentiment effects of emojis vary in the contexts of different valences.Comment: 10 pages, published at ICWSM'1

Interactive Food and Beverage Marketing: Targeting Children and Youth in the Digital Age

Looks at the practices of food and beverage industry marketers in reaching youth via digital videos, cell phones, interactive games and social networking sites. Recommends imposing governmental regulations on marketing to children and adolescents

Exploring gender effects in a mobile advertising context: On the evaluation of trust, attitudes, and recall

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11199-007-9300-7Abstract This study examines how gender affects mobile advertising acceptance in Japan. Drawing upon cultural, socioeconomic, and industry-specific factors, five hypoth- eses and two research questions are formulated for four dependent variables (trust, attitude toward the ad, attitude toward the brand, and ad recall) and two independent variables (gender and ad type). User frequency was considered a covariate. An empirical survey was conducted in Japan: Forty thousand respondents were randomly selected, and 3,254 responses were received. Two mobile campaigns (one durable and one nondurable good) were used as stimuli. Multivariate data analysis found significant multivariate effects as well as univariate effects. There was a significant interaction effect of gender and ad type on ad recall. In closing, the study’s implications are discussed

Designing Mobile Games for Learning: The mGBL Approach

This paper describes the technological environment and pedagogical frameworks underpinning the development of mobile game-based learning (mGBL) mobile games. A detailed description is given of the pedagogical and technical basis of the three game templates developed within the project, plus design and trialling details of each associated game. Finally, we discuss the development of our game authoring tool, which allows users to customise mGBL games, and locate and develop new games

Children, youth and the mobile phone

Children, youth and the mobile phone In its short life, a surprisingly large literature on the use of mobile communication among children and teens has been written. Indeed, in recent years there has hardly been a conference or a collection of readings that did not include work in this area. The iconic status of the mobile telephone among children and teens has been one of the big surprises associated with this form of communication. While originally conceived as a way to allow business people to interact, mobile telephony has become, perhaps more than anything else, a phenomenon of teens and young people. Reports from Japan (Hashimoto, 2002; Ito, 2005), the Philippines (Ellwood-Clayton, 2005) the broader Asian context (Castells et al. , 2007; Kim, 2004), Norway (Ling, 1999, 2000, 2001a,b; Ling and Yttri, 2002; Skog and Jamtøy, 2002), the UK (Green and Smith, 2002), Finland (Rautiainen and Kasesniemi, 2000; Nurmela, 2003; ..

Adolescents’ daily face-to-face and computer-mediated communication: Associations with autonomy and closeness to parents and friends

The amount of time adolescents spend communicating via digital technologies such as smartphones has led to concerns that computer-mediated communication (CMC) is displacing face-to-face (FtF) interactions and disrupting social development. Although many studies have examined CMC in adolescents' relationships with friends, few studies have examined the role of CMC in adolescents' renegotiation of closeness and autonomy with parents. To examine this issue, we administered an online daily diary with 169 U.S. adolescents to estimate the time they spend in CMC and FtF interactions and the number of texts they exchange with friends and parents. On the last day of the survey, we asked adolescents about their emotional closeness to friends and parents and their balance of closeness and volition with parents. Overall, we found more evidence for social stimulation than displacement effects of CMC. Texts and CMC time with friends predicted friend closeness after accounting for FtF time with friends; texts with parents predicted parent closeness after accounting for FtF time with parents. We also found support for our hypothesis that CMC would be associated with greater adolescent volition. CMC time with parents predicted greater volitional dependence (volition plus closeness) whereas texts with friends predicted greater independent decision-making (volition plus distance). We discuss how communication technologies are integrated into U.S. adolescents' relationships with friends and parents and how CMC can facilitate, rather than stifle, adolescents' adjustment of autonomy-relatedness with parents and their construction of emotional closeness with friends