Pedestrian Detection with Wearable Cameras for the Blind: A Two-way Perspective

Blind people have limited access to information about their surroundings, which is important for ensuring one's safety, managing social interactions, and identifying approaching pedestrians. With advances in computer vision, wearable cameras can provide equitable access to such information. However, the always-on nature of these assistive technologies poses privacy concerns for parties that may get recorded. We explore this tension from both perspectives, those of sighted passersby and blind users, taking into account camera visibility, in-person versus remote experience, and extracted visual information. We conduct two studies: an online survey with MTurkers (N=206) and an in-person experience study between pairs of blind (N=10) and sighted (N=40) participants, where blind participants wear a working prototype for pedestrian detection and pass by sighted participants. Our results suggest that both of the perspectives of users and bystanders and the several factors mentioned above need to be carefully considered to mitigate potential social tensions.Comment: The 2020 ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2020

The Future of the Internet III

Presents survey results on technology experts' predictions on the Internet's social, political, and economic impact as of 2020, including its effects on integrity and tolerance, intellectual property law, and the division between personal and work lives

Internet and the flow of knowledge: Which ethical and political challenges will we face?

The term “knowledge” is used more and more frequently for the diagnosis of societal change (as in “knowledge society”). According to Bell (1973), since the 1970s we have been experiencing the ?rst phase of such a change towards a knowledge society, consisting of a rapid expansion of the academic system and a growth of investments in research and development in many countries. In this phase, as Castells (1996) points out, information technology has been rapidly changing the workplace as well as the composition of social organisations. In this first phase, the focus has been on scienti?c knowledge, its production and application in expert cultures. Since the Mid-1990s, however, this focus has been widening, such that one can speak of a second phase of the knowledge society (Drucker 1994a, 1994b; Stehr 1994; see also Knorr-Cetina 1998; Krohn 2001). Now it is no longer only scientific knowledge that is seen as driving the change, but also ordinary knowledge and practical knowledge, as know-how. The change is, as I would put it, autocatalytic, for typical of knowledge societies is “not the centrality of knowledge and information, but the application of such knowledge and information to knowledge generation and information processing/communication devices, in a cumulative feedback loop between innovation and the uses of innovation“ (Castells 1996: 32). Science has also been changing to be part of this loop, as shown in the rise of applied sciences and in the acknowledgement of uncertainty and ignorance issues (cf. Heidenreich 2002: 4 ff.; see also Hubig 2000 and Böschen & Schulz-Schaeffer 2003). The most significant change in this second phase however is the popularization of the Internet, that is seen as a key factor that governs societal change today. So what exactly is this “knowledge” that is driving present knowledge societies? Can we rely on the philosophical analysis of the term to get some insight here

Consumers and Augmented Reality in Shopping and Services: Drivers and Consequences

This dissertation investigated the effect of augmented reality on user experience and also the mediation effect of user experience in the relationship between augmented reality and the outcome variables including user satisfaction and user’s willingness to buy/user’s willingness to use augmented reality. Three studies were conducted in three different contexts, including buying consumer products, entertainment services and vehicle service use. The results indicate that augmented reality significantly and positively influence user experience, and user experience fully mediates the impact of augmented reality on user satisfaction and user’s willingness to buy/ user’s willingness to use augmented reality. Further, the results showed that trade-off between price and value, user’s information privacy control, perceived control and responsiveness moderate the effect of augmented reality on user experience. In addition, a new scale was developed to capture and measure the output quality in terms of image recognition generated by augmented reality. Additionally, a new aspect of user experience exclusively driven by augmented reality was developed and added to the current user experience scale