TRECVid 2011 Experiments at Dublin City University

This year the iAd-DCU team participated in three of the assigned TRECVid 2011 tasks; Semantic Indexing (SIN), Interactive Known-Item Search (KIS) and Multimedia Event Detection (MED). For the SIN task we presented three full runs using global features, local features and fusion of global, local features and relationships between concepts respectively. The evaluation results show that local features achieve better performance, with marginal gains found when introducing global features and relationships between concepts. With regard to our KIS submission, similar to our 2010 KIS experiments, we have implemented an iPad interface to a KIS video search tool. The aim of this year’s experimentation was to evaluate different display methodologies for KIS interaction. For this work, we integrate a clustering element for keyframes, which operates over MPEG-7 features using k-means clustering. In addition, we employ concept detection, not simply for search, but as a means of choosing most representative keyframes for ranked items. For our experiments we compare the baseline non-clustering system to a clustering system on a topic by topic basis. Finally, for the first time this year the iAd group at DCU has been involved in the MED Task. Two techniques are compared, employing low-level features directly and using concepts as intermediate representations. Evaluation results show promising initial results when performing event detection using concepts as intermediate representations

StateLens: A Reverse Engineering Solution for Making Existing Dynamic Touchscreens Accessible

Blind people frequently encounter inaccessible dynamic touchscreens in their everyday lives that are difficult, frustrating, and often impossible to use independently. Touchscreens are often the only way to control everything from coffee machines and payment terminals, to subway ticket machines and in-flight entertainment systems. Interacting with dynamic touchscreens is difficult non-visually because the visual user interfaces change, interactions often occur over multiple different screens, and it is easy to accidentally trigger interface actions while exploring the screen. To solve these problems, we introduce StateLens - a three-part reverse engineering solution that makes existing dynamic touchscreens accessible. First, StateLens reverse engineers the underlying state diagrams of existing interfaces using point-of-view videos found online or taken by users using a hybrid crowd-computer vision pipeline. Second, using the state diagrams, StateLens automatically generates conversational agents to guide blind users through specifying the tasks that the interface can perform, allowing the StateLens iOS application to provide interactive guidance and feedback so that blind users can access the interface. Finally, a set of 3D-printed accessories enable blind people to explore capacitive touchscreens without the risk of triggering accidental touches on the interface. Our technical evaluation shows that StateLens can accurately reconstruct interfaces from stationary, hand-held, and web videos; and, a user study of the complete system demonstrates that StateLens successfully enables blind users to access otherwise inaccessible dynamic touchscreens.Comment: ACM UIST 201

Evaluation of Interfaces for Senior Citizens: BigScreenLive, Eldy and PointerWare

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Science, Mathematics, and Computing of Bard College

Online Personal Computer Assembling Troubleshooting (P-CAT.com)

This report describes the research efforts that have been carried out for the Final Year Project. P-CAT.com developed to improve the current way of searching the solution to the PC assembling over the internet. Hence, to educate the PC users about the computer component and solve the PC problem own their own. For the basis of implementation, a literature review is determined the issue involved, how to overcome them and designing graphical user interface based on the previous study on human computer interaction. In the literature review included the lesson learnt from the existing almost similar project. Beside the research have been conducted to determined user requirement and needs, the result have been summarize to determine next step to conduct. This report also explains the planning phase which includes the system architecture design, network architecture and design document. Next, the report describes the strategies and tools used to develop P-CAT.com. Finally, the purpose of gathering data together with its conclusions, recommendations and future enhancement are briefly described in this report. While, the next steps involved in developing P-CAT.com to meet its goals as initially proposed

Intelligent system for eliciting and explaining knowledge

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2005.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 97-100).We propose i-Seek, an Intelligent System for Eliciting and Explaining Knowledge that leverages the OpenMind [1] Commonsense knowledge base in conjunction with domain- specific knowledge in Personal Finance, Technical Help, and Health domains to act as an advisory system for novice users. Most of the interfaces are plagued by recurrent key problems: 1) elicitation - how to ask questions that enable the expert model to make decisions, and at the same time, are understandable to the novice, and 2) explanation - how to explain rationale behind expert decisions in terms that the user can understand. i- Seek maps the user's goals and expectations to the corresponding expert model's attributes as expressed in domain-specific terms. For example, instead of asking "What is your risk tolerance?", where the user might not comprehend the notion of risk tolerance, i-Seek tries to elicit the same information by asking a non-direct question such as "Do you usually buy lots of lottery tickets?". i-Seek constructs the novice user model by taking into account the user's personal information, interactions history, and the current context.by Ashwani Kumar.S.M

SymbolDesign: A User-centered Method to Design Pen-based Interfaces and Extend the Functionality of Pointer Input Devices

A method called "SymbolDesign" is proposed that can be used to design user-centered interfaces for pen-based input devices. It can also extend the functionality of pointer input devices such as the traditional computer mouse or the Camera Mouse, a camera-based computer interface. Users can create their own interfaces by choosing single-stroke movement patterns that are convenient to draw with the selected input device and by mapping them to a desired set of commands. A pattern could be the trace of a moving finger detected with the Camera Mouse or a symbol drawn with an optical pen. The core of the SymbolDesign system is a dynamically created classifier, in the current implementation an artificial neural network. The architecture of the neural network automatically adjusts according to the complexity of the classification task. In experiments, subjects used the SymbolDesign method to design and test the interfaces they created, for example, to browse the web. The experiments demonstrated good recognition accuracy and responsiveness of the user interfaces. The method provided an easily-designed and easily-used computer input mechanism for people without physical limitations, and, with some modifications, has the potential to become a computer access tool for people with severe paralysis.National Science Foundation (IIS-0093367, IIS-0308213, IIS-0329009, EIA-0202067

UsaGame – A new methodology to support user- centered design of touchscreen game applications

Dissertação para Obtenção do Grau de Mestre em Engenharia e Gestão IndustrialTouchscreen mobile devices growth resulted in an explosion of the mobile applications. Focusing on touch mobile game applications this study aims to fulfill a research gap, creating appropriate usability guidelines for these applications. Concerns about usability, touch technologies, mobile devices and game testing, provided the background needs for this study. Initial game application tests allowed for the creation and implementation of such proposed usability guidelines into a support checklist (UsaGame), designed to help applications developers. An evaluation test was performed with 20 users in order to assess the validity of the proposed guidelines. Results from the test of the two builds from the same game application allowed comparisons that led to the assessment of the importance of some of the guidelines implemented into the application. Results suggested a usability improvement on the game application implemented with the guidelines. Furthermore results allowed commenting on all proposed usability guidelines

Download time and intent to use a web page: Working paper series--02-09

The World-Wide Web (WWW) has grown, and continues to grow, at an epic rate. Unlike applications software, which provides a structured navigation schema, the web encourages users to move frequently from page to page. In most cases, a web site has only one chance to make a favorable first impression. If a web page takes more than a few seconds to present this first impression, the user may decide to abandon or "bail out" from the current site and move to another site. The result of failure to deliver information to the user in a "reasonable" amount of time to a commercial web site is the loss of business--possibly forever. This research indicates that web page download time has both direct and antecedent effects on a user's behavioral intent to use a web page. In addition, this research indicates that traditional models used to assess behavioral intent and subsequent usage of applications software may not be useful in evaluating a user's intent to use a web page and that alternative predictive models should be evaluated