An interaction abstraction toolkit for public display applications

Tese de doutoramento em Tecnologias e Sistemas de InformaçãoPublic digital displays have become increasingly ubiquitous in our technological landscape. Considering their flexibility and communication potential, public displays can become an important communication channel and even reach the attention, usage, and relevance that smartphones have today. Interaction with public displays is recognised as a key element in making them more engaging and valuable, but most public display systems still do not support any interactive feature. A key reason behind this apparent paradox is the lack of efficient and clear abstractions for incorporating interactivity into public display applications. While interaction can be achieved for a specific display system with a particular interaction modality, the lack of proper interaction abstractions means that there is too much specific work that needs to be done outside the core application functionality to support even basic forms of interaction. In this work, we investigate and develop interaction abstractions for public displays. We start by analysing public displays from the point of view of the information that results from the various interactions and that can be used to drive several types of content adaptation behaviour on public displays. We call this information digital footprints, and the result is a framework that maps digital footprints to adaptation strategies and to interaction mechanisms. This framework can be used by display designers to help them choose the interaction mechanisms that a display should support in order to be able to collect a given set of footprints, creating more relevant displays that are able to automatically adapt to their environment. We then identify and characterise interaction tasks and controls that are appropriate for public display interaction. This analysis results in a design space that can form the foundation of interaction toolkits, giving system developers with a reference for the types of high-level tasks and controls that can be incorporated into a toolkit. Finally, we design, implement, and evaluate a software toolkit of interaction abstractions for public display applications – the PuReWidgets toolkit. Programmers can use this toolkit to easily incorporate interactive features into their web-based public display applications. PuReWidgets provides high-level abstractions that shield programmers from the low-level details of the interaction mechanisms. We evaluate this toolkit along various dimensions. First, we evaluate the system’s performance. We then evaluate the API’s flexibility and capabilities using our own experience in developing interactive applications with it. We also evaluate the API’s usability from the perspective of independent programmers. Finally, we provide an evaluation of the resulting system’s usability from the perspective of an end-user interacting with a real-world deployment of a public display. The evaluation results indicate that PuReWidgets is an efficient, usable, and flexible toolkit for web-based interactive public display applications. By making this toolkit publicly available, we hope to promote the development of more and newer kinds of interactive public display applications inside and, more importantly, outside the research community.Os ecrãs públicos digitais estão cada vez mais presentes na nossa paisagem tecnológica. Considerando a sua flexibilidade e capacidade de ligação em rede, os ecrãs públicos têm o potencial para se tornarem num importante canal de comunicação e talvez até atingir a atenção, utilização e relevância que os smartphones têm hoje em dia. A interactividade dos ecrãs públicos ´e reconhecida como um elemento chave para os tornar mais atractivos e valiosos, mas a maioria dos sistemas de ecrãs públicos actuais ainda não suporta nenhuma forma de interação. Uma razão por detrás deste aparente paradoxo é a falta de abstrações claras e eficientes para incorporar interactividade nas aplicações para ecrãs públicos. Apesar de a interação poder ser conseguida para sistemas específicos, com uma modalidade de interação específica, a falta de abstrações de interação apropriadas significa que ´e necessário demasiado trabalho específico fora das funcionalidades nucleares da aplicação para suportar ate as formas mais básicas de interação. Neste trabalho, investigamos e desenvolvemos abstrações de interação para ecrãs públicos. Começamos por analisar os ecrãs públicos do ponto de vista da informação que resulta das interações e de que forma pode ser utilizada em procedimentos de adaptação de conteúdo para ecrãs públicos. Chamamos a esta informação digital footprints, e o resultado é uma estrutura conceptual que mapeia as digital footprints em estratégias de adaptação e em mecanismos de interação. Esta estrutura pode ser utilizada por designers de ecrãs públicos para ajudar a escolher os mecanismos de interação que um determinado ecrã deve suportar de forma a poder recolher um determinado conjunto de digital footprints, criando assim ecrãs com conteúdos mais relevantes e que são capazes de se adaptar ao seu ambiente social. De seguida, identificamos e caracterizamos tarefas de interação e controlos apropriados para interação com ecrãs públicos. Esta análise resulta num espaço de desenho que pode servir de base para toolkits de interação, dando uma referência aos designers do sistema para os tipos de controlos que podem ser incorporados no toolkit. Finalmente, projectamos, implementamos e avaliamos um toolkit de abstrações de interação para aplicações para ecrãs públicos – o toolkit PuReWidgets. Os programadores podem utilizar este toolkit para incorporar facilmente funcionalidades interactivas nas suas aplicações, baseadas na web, para ecrãs públicos. O PuReWidgets fornece abstrações de alto nível que protegem os programadores dos detalhes de baixo nível associados aos mecanismos de interação. O toolkit é avaliado segundo várias dimensões. Primeiro, avaliamos o desempenho do sistema. De seguida, avaliamos a flexibilidade e capacidades da API, usando a nossa própria experiencia no desenvolvimento de aplicações interactivas. Avaliamos também a usabilidade da API da perspectiva de programadores independentes. Finalmente, avaliamos o toolkit da perspectiva dos utilizadores que interagem com um ecrã público num ambiente real. Os resultados da avaliação indicam que o PuReWidgets é um toolkit eficiente, flexível e usável para aplicações interactivas para ecrãs públicos. Ao tornar este toolkit disponível publicamente, esperamos promover o desenvolvimento de mais aplicações interactivas para ecrãs públicos dentro e, mais importante, fora da comunidade de investigação.This research was supported by the Funda¸c˜ao para a Ciˆencia e Tecnologia (FCT) PhD training grant SFRH/BD/47354/2008. This research has also received funding from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement no. 244011 (PD-Net)

Health privacy : methods for privacy-preserving data sharing of methylation, microbiome and eye tracking data

This thesis studies the privacy risks of biomedical data and develops mechanisms for privacy-preserving data sharing. The contribution of this work is two-fold: First, we demonstrate privacy risks of a variety of biomedical data types such as DNA methylation data, microbiome data and eye tracking data. Despite being less stable than well-studied genome data and more prone to environmental changes, well-known privacy attacks can be adopted and threaten the privacy of data donors. Nevertheless, data sharing is crucial to advance biomedical research given that collection the data of a sufficiently large population is complex and costly. Therefore, we develop as a second step privacy- preserving tools that enable researchers to share such biomedical data. and second, we equip researchers with tools to enable privacy-preserving data sharing. These tools are mostly based on differential privacy, machine learning techniques and adversarial examples and carefully tuned to the concrete use case to maintain data utility while preserving privacy.Diese Dissertation beleuchtet Risiken für die Privatsphäre von biomedizinischen Daten und entwickelt Mechanismen für privatsphäre-erthaltendes Teilen von Daten. Dies zerfällt in zwei Teile: Zunächst zeigen wir die Risiken für die Privatsphäre auf, die von biomedizinischen Daten wie DNA Methylierung, Mikrobiomdaten und bei der Aufnahme von Augenbewegungen vorkommen. Obwohl diese Daten weniger stabil sind als Genomdaten, deren Risiken der Forschung gut bekannt sind, und sich mehr unter Umwelteinflüssen ändern, können bekannte Angriffe angepasst werden und bedrohen die Privatsphäre der Datenspender. Dennoch ist das Teilen von Daten essentiell um biomedizinische Forschung voranzutreiben, denn Daten von einer ausreichend großen Studienpopulation zu sammeln ist aufwändig und teuer. Deshalb entwickeln wir als zweiten Schritt privatsphäre-erhaltende Techniken, die es Wissenschaftlern erlauben, solche biomedizinischen Daten zu teilen. Diese Techniken basieren im Wesentlichen auf differentieller Privatsphäre und feindlichen Beispielen und sind sorgfältig auf den konkreten Einsatzzweck angepasst um den Nutzen der Daten zu erhalten und gleichzeitig die Privatsphäre zu schützen

Around-Body Interaction: Leveraging Limb Movements for Interacting in a Digitally Augmented Physical World

Recent technological advances have made head-mounted displays (HMDs) smaller and untethered, fostering the vision of ubiquitous interaction with information in a digitally augmented physical world. For interacting with such devices, three main types of input - besides not very intuitive finger gestures - have emerged so far: 1) Touch input on the frame of the devices or 2) on accessories (controller) as well as 3) voice input. While these techniques have both advantages and disadvantages depending on the current situation of the user, they largely ignore the skills and dexterity that we show when interacting with the real world: Throughout our lives, we have trained extensively to use our limbs to interact with and manipulate the physical world around us. This thesis explores how the skills and dexterity of our upper and lower limbs, acquired and trained in interacting with the real world, can be transferred to the interaction with HMDs. Thus, this thesis develops the vision of around-body interaction, in which we use the space around our body, defined by the reach of our limbs, for fast, accurate, and enjoyable interaction with such devices. This work contributes four interaction techniques, two for the upper limbs and two for the lower limbs: The first contribution shows how the proximity between our head and hand can be used to interact with HMDs. The second contribution extends the interaction with the upper limbs to multiple users and illustrates how the registration of augmented information in the real world can support cooperative use cases. The third contribution shifts the focus to the lower limbs and discusses how foot taps can be leveraged as an input modality for HMDs. The fourth contribution presents how lateral shifts of the walking path can be exploited for mobile and hands-free interaction with HMDs while walking.Comment: thesi

Enabling Collaborative Visual Analysis across Heterogeneous Devices

We are surrounded by novel device technologies emerging at an unprecedented pace. These devices are heterogeneous in nature: in large and small sizes with many input and sensing mechanisms. When many such devices are used by multiple users with a shared goal, they form a heterogeneous device ecosystem. A device ecosystem has great potential in data science to act as a natural medium for multiple analysts to make sense of data using visualization. It is essential as today's big data problems require more than a single mind or a single machine to solve them. Towards this vision, I introduce the concept of collaborative, cross-device visual analytics (C2-VA) and outline a reference model to develop user interfaces for C2-VA. This dissertation covers interaction models, coordination techniques, and software platforms to enable full stack support for C2-VA. Firstly, we connected devices to form an ecosystem using software primitives introduced in the early frameworks from this dissertation. To work in a device ecosystem, we designed multi-user interaction for visual analysis in front of large displays by finding a balance between proxemics and mid-air gestures. Extending these techniques, we considered the roles of different devices–large and small–to present a conceptual framework for utilizing multiple devices for visual analytics. When applying this framework, findings from a user study showcase flexibility in the analytic workflow and potential for generation of complex insights in device ecosystems. Beyond this, we supported coordination between multiple users in a device ecosystem by depicting the presence, attention, and data coverage of each analyst within a group. Building on these parts of the C2-VA stack, the culmination of this dissertation is a platform called Vistrates. This platform introduces a component model for modular creation of user interfaces that work across multiple devices and users. A component is an analytical primitive–a data processing method, a visualization, or an interaction technique–that is reusable, composable, and extensible. Together, components can support a complex analytical activity. On top of the component model, the support for collaboration and device ecosystems comes for granted in Vistrates. Overall, this enables the exploration of new research ideas within C2-VA

Communicative Constructions and the Refiguration of Spaces

The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com , has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license Through a variety of empirical studies, this volume offers fresh insights into the manner in which different forms of communicative action transform urban space. With attention to the methodological questions that arise from the attempt to study such changes empirically, it offers new theoretical foundations for understanding the social construction and reconstruction of spaces through communicative action. Seeing communicative action as the basic element in the social construction of reality and conceptualizing communication not only in terms of the use of language and texts, but as involving any kind of objectification, such as technologies, bodies and non-verbal signs, it considers the roles of both direct and mediatized (or digitized) communication. An examination of the conceptualization of the communicative (re-)construction of spaces and the means by which this change might be empirically investigated, this book demonstrates the fruitfulness of the notion of refiguration as a means by which to understand the transformation of contemporary societies. As such, it will appeal to sociologists, social theorists, and geographers with interests in social construction and urban space