On the development of idShare, a platform to support interaction design activities of small co-located teams

Externalizations and boundary objects are crucial for effectively communicating between stakeholders in multidisciplinary design teams. Especially when discussing ideas for new interactions, practitioners are increasingly finding themselves in need of new tools that allow them to rapidly, easily and more explicitly describe the dynamically changing aspects of their designs. For this purpose, we are investigating, in collaboration with the design departments of three industrial companies, the development and evaluation of a platform to support co-located (interaction) design activities. Previous research has already resulted in innovations in both hardware and software infrastructure, and in this workshop paper we therefore mostly report on some recent and planned activities towards a more coherent vision for an environment that we have named idShare. This is an interactive space that consists of two areas, an area for individual work and an area for the coordination of collaborative activities. In this paper we describe the aim and motivation of our research, the current stage of the development of the tools, and the design process and evaluations that are conducted in collaboration with the industrial partners

On the development of idShare, a platform to support interaction design activities of small co-located teams

Externalizations and boundary objects are crucial for effectively communicating between stakeholders in multidisciplinary design teams. Especially when discussing ideas for new interactions, practitioners are increasingly finding themselves in need of new tools that allow them to rapidly, easily and more explicitly describe the dynamically changing aspects of their designs. For this purpose, we are investigating, in collaboration with the design departments of three industrial companies, the development and evaluation of a platform to support co-located (interaction) design activities. Previous research has already resulted in innovations in both hardware and software infrastructure, and in this workshop paper we therefore mostly report on some recent and planned activities towards a more coherent vision for an environment that we have named idShare. This is an interactive space that consists of two areas, an area for individual work and an area for the coordination of collaborative activities. In this paper we describe the aim and motivation of our research, the current stage of the development of the tools, and the design process and evaluations that are conducted in collaboration with the industrial partners

Video interaction using pen-based technology

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Doutor em InformáticaVideo can be considered one of the most complete and complex media and its manipulating is still a difficult and tedious task. This research applies pen-based technology to video manipulation, with the goal to improve this interaction. Even though the human familiarity with pen-based devices, how they can be used on video interaction, in order to improve it, making it more natural and at the same time fostering the user’s creativity is an open question. Two types of interaction with video were considered in this work: video annotation and video editing. Each interaction type allows the study of one of the interaction modes of using pen-based technology: indirectly, through digital ink, or directly, trough pen gestures or pressure. This research contributes with two approaches for pen-based video interaction: pen-based video annotations and video as ink. The first uses pen-based annotations combined with motion tracking algorithms, in order to augment video content with sketches or handwritten notes. It aims to study how pen-based technology can be used to annotate a moving objects and how to maintain the association between a pen-based annotations and the annotated moving object The second concept replaces digital ink by video content, studding how pen gestures and pressure can be used on video editing and what kind of changes are needed in the interface, in order to provide a more familiar and creative interaction in this usage context.This work was partially funded by the UTAustin-Portugal, Digital Media, Program (Ph.D. grant: SFRH/BD/42662/2007 - FCT/MCTES); by the HP Technology for Teaching Grant Initiative 2006; by the project "TKB - A Transmedia Knowledge Base for contemporary dance" (PTDC/EAT/AVP/098220/2008 funded by FCT/MCTES); and by CITI/DI/FCT/UNL (PEst-OE/EEI/UI0527/2011

Collaborative behavior, performance and engagement with visual analytics tasks using mobile devices

Interactive visualizations are external tools that can support users’ exploratory activities. Collaboration can bring benefits to the exploration of visual representations or visu‐ alizations. This research investigates the use of co‐located collaborative visualizations in mobile devices, how users working with two different modes of interaction and view (Shared or Non‐Shared) and how being placed at various position arrangements (Corner‐to‐Corner, Face‐to‐Face, and Side‐by‐Side) affect their knowledge acquisition, engagement level, and learning efficiency. A user study is conducted with 60 partici‐ pants divided into 6 groups (2 modes×3 positions) using a tool that we developed to support the exploration of 3D visual structures in a collaborative manner. Our results show that the shared control and view version in the Side‐by‐Side position is the most favorable and can improve task efficiency. In this paper, we present the results and a set of recommendations that are derived from them

Inductance-based Flexible Pressure Sensor for Assistive Gloves

This paper presents an inductance-based flexible pressure sensor to support the tactile communication between deafblind people. The pressure sensor was realized with a soft ferromagnetic elastomer and a 17μm-thick coil fabricated on a 50 μm thick flexible polyimide sheet. The ferromagnetic elastomer acts as the core of the coil, which when pressed, sees the metal particles moving closer to each other and leads to changes in the inductance. The coil, with 75μm wide wires and 25μm pitch, was realized using LIGA (Lithographie Galvanoformung, Abformung) micro molding technique. Four different sensors have been fabricated using different ratios (1:1, 2:1, 3:1 and 5:1) of ecoflex and iron nanoparticles. The results show that the higher the ratio the better the response of the sensor. The presented sensor is intended to be integrated in a smart glove having dual function of tactile sensing and vibrotactile feedback

Visualization of Tree-Structured Data Through a Multi Touch User Interface

This writing project examines different types of visualizations for tree-structured data sets. Visualizations discussed include link-node diagrams and treemap diagrams. Also discussed is recent innovations with regards to distinguishing multi touch from single touch technology. I explore the requirements needed to build a multi touch table top surface, and describe the process of building one. I then describe my proposed method of visualizing tree-structured data and how it can be implemented using Core Animation technology. I also propose a means of interacting with the data through a multi touch interface, and discuss which gestures can be used to navigate the visualization display

1D-Touch: NLP-Assisted Coarse Text Selection via a Semi-Direct Gesture

Existing text selection techniques on touchscreen focus on improving the control for moving the carets. Coarse-grained text selection on word and phrase levels has not received much support beyond word-snapping and entity recognition. We introduce 1D-Touch, a novel text selection method that complements the carets-based sub-word selection by facilitating the selection of semantic units of words and above. This method employs a simple vertical slide gesture to expand and contract a selection area from a word. The expansion can be by words or by semantic chunks ranging from sub-phrases to sentences. This technique shifts the concept of text selection, from defining a range by locating the first and last words, towards a dynamic process of expanding and contracting a textual semantic entity. To understand the effects of our approach, we prototyped and tested two variants: WordTouch, which offers a straightforward word-by-word expansion, and ChunkTouch, which leverages NLP to chunk text into syntactic units, allowing the selection to grow by semantically meaningful units in response to the sliding gesture. Our evaluation, focused on the coarse-grained selection tasks handled by 1D-Touch, shows a 20% improvement over the default word-snapping selection method on Android

Visualizing and Interacting with Concept Hierarchies

Concept Hierarchies and Formal Concept Analysis are theoretically well grounded and largely experimented methods. They rely on line diagrams called Galois lattices for visualizing and analysing object-attribute sets. Galois lattices are visually seducing and conceptually rich for experts. However they present important drawbacks due to their concept oriented overall structure: analysing what they show is difficult for non experts, navigation is cumbersome, interaction is poor, and scalability is a deep bottleneck for visual interpretation even for experts. In this paper we introduce semantic probes as a means to overcome many of these problems and extend usability and application possibilities of traditional FCA visualization methods. Semantic probes are visual user centred objects which extract and organize reduced Galois sub-hierarchies. They are simpler, clearer, and they provide a better navigation support through a rich set of interaction possibilities. Since probe driven sub-hierarchies are limited to users focus, scalability is under control and interpretation is facilitated. After some successful experiments, several applications are being developed with the remaining problem of finding a compromise between simplicity and conceptual expressivity

A Semantic-Based Framework for Summarization and Page Segmentation in Web Mining

This chapter addresses two crucial issues that arise when one applies Web-mining techniques for extracting relevant information. The first one is the acquisition of useful knowledge from textual data; the second issue stems from the fact that a web page often proposes a considerable amount of \u2018noise\u2019 with respect to the sections that are truly informative for the user's purposes. The novelty contribution of this work lies in a framework that can tackle both these tasks at the same time, supporting text summarization and page segmentation. The approach achieves this goal by exploiting semantic networks to map natural language into an abstract representation, which eventually supports the identification of the topics addressed in a text source. A heuristic algorithm uses the abstract representation to highlight the relevant segments of text in the original document. The verification of the approach effectiveness involved a publicly available benchmark, the DUC 2002 dataset, and satisfactory results confirmed the method effectiveness