Information Compression, Intelligence, Computing, and Mathematics

This paper presents evidence for the idea that much of artificial intelligence, human perception and cognition, mainstream computing, and mathematics, may be understood as compression of information via the matching and unification of patterns. This is the basis for the "SP theory of intelligence", outlined in the paper and fully described elsewhere. Relevant evidence may be seen: in empirical support for the SP theory; in some advantages of information compression (IC) in terms of biology and engineering; in our use of shorthands and ordinary words in language; in how we merge successive views of any one thing; in visual recognition; in binocular vision; in visual adaptation; in how we learn lexical and grammatical structures in language; and in perceptual constancies. IC via the matching and unification of patterns may be seen in both computing and mathematics: in IC via equations; in the matching and unification of names; in the reduction or removal of redundancy from unary numbers; in the workings of Post's Canonical System and the transition function in the Universal Turing Machine; in the way computers retrieve information from memory; in systems like Prolog; and in the query-by-example technique for information retrieval. The chunking-with-codes technique for IC may be seen in the use of named functions to avoid repetition of computer code. The schema-plus-correction technique may be seen in functions with parameters and in the use of classes in object-oriented programming. And the run-length coding technique may be seen in multiplication, in division, and in several other devices in mathematics and computing. The SP theory resolves the apparent paradox of "decompression by compression". And computing and cognition as IC is compatible with the uses of redundancy in such things as backup copies to safeguard data and understanding speech in a noisy environment

Exploring the Affective Loop

Research in psychology and neurology shows that both body and mind are involved when experiencing emotions (Damasio 1994, Davidson et al. 2003). People are also very physical when they try to communicate their emotions. Somewhere in between beings consciously and unconsciously aware of it ourselves, we produce both verbal and physical signs to make other people understand how we feel. Simultaneously, this production of signs involves us in a stronger personal experience of the emotions we express. Emotions are also communicated in the digital world, but there is little focus on users' personal as well as physical experience of emotions in the available digital media. In order to explore whether and how we can expand existing media, we have designed, implemented and evaluated /eMoto/, a mobile service for sending affective messages to others. With eMoto, we explicitly aim to address both cognitive and physical experiences of human emotions. Through combining affective gestures for input with affective expressions that make use of colors, shapes and animations for the background of messages, the interaction "pulls" the user into an /affective loop/. In this thesis we define what we mean by affective loop and present a user-centered design approach expressed through four design principles inspired by previous work within Human Computer Interaction (HCI) but adjusted to our purposes; /embodiment/ (Dourish 2001) as a means to address how people communicate emotions in real life, /flow/ (Csikszentmihalyi 1990) to reach a state of involvement that goes further than the current context, /ambiguity/ of the designed expressions (Gaver et al. 2003) to allow for open-ended interpretation by the end-users instead of simplistic, one-emotion one-expression pairs and /natural but designed expressions/ to address people's natural couplings between cognitively and physically experienced emotions. We also present results from an end-user study of eMoto that indicates that subjects got both physically and emotionally involved in the interaction and that the designed "openness" and ambiguity of the expressions, was appreciated and understood by our subjects. Through the user study, we identified four potential design problems that have to be tackled in order to achieve an affective loop effect; the extent to which users' /feel in control/ of the interaction, /harmony and coherence/ between cognitive and physical expressions/,/ /timing/ of expressions and feedback in a communicational setting, and effects of users' /personality/ on their emotional expressions and experiences of the interaction

Conceptual design framework for information visualization to support multidimensional datasets in higher education institutions

Information Visualization (InfoVis) enjoys diverse adoption and applicability because of its strength in solving the problem of information overload inherent in institutional data. Policy and decision makers of higher education institutions (HEIs) are also experiencing information overload while interacting with students‟ data, because of its multidimensionality. This constraints decision making processes, and therefore requires a domain-specific InfoVis conceptual design framework which will birth the domain‟s InfoVis tool. This study therefore aims to design HEI Students‟ data-focused InfoVis (HSDI) conceptual design framework which addresses the content delivery techniques and the systematic processes in actualizing the domain specific InfoVis. The study involved four phases: 1) a users‟ study to investigate, elicit and prioritize the students‟ data-related explicit knowledge preferences of HEI domain policy. The corresponding students‟ data dimensions are then categorised, 2) exploratory study through content analysis of InfoVis design literatures, and subsequent mapping with findings from the users‟ study, to propose the appropriate visualization, interaction and distortion techniques for delivering the domain‟s explicit knowledge preferences, 3) conceptual development of the design framework which integrates the techniques‟ model with its design process–as identified from adaptation of software engineering and InfoVis design models, 4) evaluation of the proposed framework through expert review, prototyping, heuristics evaluation, and users‟ experience evaluation. For an InfoVis that will appropriately present and represent the domain explicit knowledge preferences, support the students‟ data multidimensionality and the decision making processes, the study found that: 1) mouse-on, mouse-on-click, mouse on-drag, drop down menu, push button, check boxes, and dynamics cursor hinting are the appropriate interaction techniques, 2) zooming, overview with details, scrolling, and exploration are the appropriate distortion techniques, and 3) line chart, scatter plot, map view, bar chart and pie chart are the appropriate visualization techniques. The theoretical support to the proposed framework suggests that dictates of preattentive processing theory, cognitive-fit theory, and normative and descriptive theories must be followed for InfoVis to aid perception, cognition and decision making respectively. This study contributes to the area of InfoVis, data-driven decision making process, and HEI students‟ data usage process

Psychophysiology-based QoE assessment : a survey

We present a survey of psychophysiology-based assessment for quality of experience (QoE) in advanced multimedia technologies. We provide a classification of methods relevant to QoE and describe related psychological processes, experimental design considerations, and signal analysis techniques. We summarize multimodal techniques and discuss several important aspects of psychophysiology-based QoE assessment, including the synergies with psychophysical assessment and the need for standardized experimental design. This survey is not considered to be exhaustive but serves as a guideline for those interested to further explore this emerging field of research

DHRS 2009 Proceedings of the Ninth Danish Human-Computer Interaction Research Symposium.

Since 2001 the annual Danish Human-Computer Interaction Research Symposium has been a platform for networking, and provided an opportunity to get an overview across the various parts of the Danish HCI research scene. This years symposium was held in Aarhus, Denmark on December 14, 200