Smart Photos

Recent technological leaps have been a great catalyst for changing how people interact with the world around us. Specifically, the field of Augmented Reality has led to many software and hardware advances that have formed a digital intermediary between humans and their environment. As of now, Augmented Reality is available to the select few with the means of obtaining Google Glass, Oculus Rifts, and other relatively expensive platforms. Be that as it may, the tech industry\u27s current goal has been integration of this technology into the public\u27s smartphones and everyday devices. One inhibitor of this goal is the difficulty of finding an Augmented Reality application whose usage could satisfy an everyday need or attraction. Augmented reality presents our world in a unique perspective that can be found nowhere else in the natural world. However, visual impact is weak without substance or meaning. The best technology is invisible, and what makes a good product is its ability to fill a void in a person\u27s life. The most important researchers in this field are those who have been augmenting the tasks that most would consider mundane, such as overlaying nutritional information directly onto a meal [4]. In the same vein, we hope to incorporate Augmented Reality into everyday life by unlocking the full potential of a technology often believed to have already have reached its peak. The humble photograph, a classic invention and unwavering enhancement to the human experience, captures moments in space and time and compresses them into a single permanent state. These two-dimensional assortments of pixels give us a physical representation of the memories we form in specific periods of our lives. We believe this representation can be further enhanced in what we like to call a Smart Photo. The idea behind a Smart Photo is to unlock the full potential in the way that people can interact with photographs. This same notion is explored in the field of Virtual Reality with inventions such as 3D movies, which provide a special appeal that ordinary 2D films cannot. The 3D technology places the viewer inside the film\u27s environment. We intend to marry this seemingly mutually exclusive dichotomy by processing 2D photos alongside their 3D counterparts

Understanding face and eye visibility in front-facing cameras of smartphones used in the wild

Commodity mobile devices are now equipped with high-resolution front-facing cameras, allowing applications in biometrics (e.g., FaceID in the iPhone X), facial expression analysis, or gaze interaction. However, it is unknown how often users hold devices in a way that allows capturing their face or eyes, and how this impacts detection accuracy. We collected 25,726 in-the-wild photos, taken from the front-facing camera of smartphones as well as associated application usage logs. We found that the full face is visible about 29% of the time, and that in most cases the face is only partially visible. Furthermore, we identified an influence of users' current activity; for example, when watching videos, the eyes but not the entire face are visible 75% of the time in our dataset. We found that a state-of-the-art face detection algorithm performs poorly against photos taken from front-facing cameras. We discuss how these findings impact mobile applications that leverage face and eye detection, and derive practical implications to address state-of-the art's limitations

Delivering elder-care environments utilizing TV-channel based mechanisms

In this paper, we present a smart environment for elderly. What makes the development of such system challenging is that the concept of smartness for elderly brings to the extreme the idea of invisibility of the technology. In our experience, elders are well-disposed to new technologies, provided that those will not require significant changes - namely, they are invisible - to their habits. Starting from this consideration, 200 caregivers responses were collected by questionnaire, so as to better understand elders' needs and habits. A system was subsequently developed allowing elders to access a number of "modern web services" as standard TV channels: at channel 43 there is the health status, at channel 45 the photos of the family, at 46 the agenda of the week, just to mention few of the available services. The content of such services is automatically generated by the smart devices in the environment and is managed by the caregivers (e.g., family members) by simple web apps. Fourteen families were asked to install the system in their house. The results of these experiments confirm that the proposed system is considered effective and user-friendly by elders

Beyond First/Last Mile Active Transportation - BikeShare@UH

Bike sharing is a new green transportation solution that has been developed and adopted at various cities around the world. In this paper, we present the process and results of the design and prototypes that a group of undergraduate students developed for a BikeShare@UH program during Summer 2017. After presenting the detailed results of four project teams focusing on customer discovery, bike share station (BSS) location identification, cloud-based mobile computing platform for user engagement and bike share program operation and management, smart lock, and alternative energy source based on PV panel. With the phase one implementation at the University planned in Spring 2018, we anticipate gathering real time data and feedback to improve the system.Cockrell School of Engineerin

Encouraging Privacy-Aware Smartphone App Installation: Finding out what the Technically-Adept Do

Smartphone apps can harvest very personal details from the phone with ease. This is a particular privacy concern. Unthinking installation of untrustworthy apps constitutes risky behaviour. This could be due to poor awareness or a lack of knowhow: knowledge of how to go about protecting privacy. It seems that Smartphone owners proceed with installation, ignoring any misgivings they might have, and thereby irretrievably sacrifice their privacy

FOTE 2008 Conference Report

A report prepared by JA.Net and ULCC about the Future of Technology in Education (FOTE 2008) conference, Imperial College, 3rd October 2008. It covers the main speakers, themes and presentations: Cloud Computing, Second Life, Portability, Personalisation, Shared Services, Campus of the Future, Mobile Technology, Creativity and Media Production, Social Collaboration Tools for Staff and Students

The Curious Case of the PDF Converter that Likes Mozart: Dissecting and Mitigating the Privacy Risk of Personal Cloud Apps

Third party apps that work on top of personal cloud services such as Google Drive and Dropbox, require access to the user's data in order to provide some functionality. Through detailed analysis of a hundred popular Google Drive apps from Google's Chrome store, we discover that the existing permission model is quite often misused: around two thirds of analyzed apps are over-privileged, i.e., they access more data than is needed for them to function. In this work, we analyze three different permission models that aim to discourage users from installing over-privileged apps. In experiments with 210 real users, we discover that the most successful permission model is our novel ensemble method that we call Far-reaching Insights. Far-reaching Insights inform the users about the data-driven insights that apps can make about them (e.g., their topics of interest, collaboration and activity patterns etc.) Thus, they seek to bridge the gap between what third parties can actually know about users and users perception of their privacy leakage. The efficacy of Far-reaching Insights in bridging this gap is demonstrated by our results, as Far-reaching Insights prove to be, on average, twice as effective as the current model in discouraging users from installing over-privileged apps. In an effort for promoting general privacy awareness, we deploy a publicly available privacy oriented app store that uses Far-reaching Insights. Based on the knowledge extracted from data of the store's users (over 115 gigabytes of Google Drive data from 1440 users with 662 installed apps), we also delineate the ecosystem for third-party cloud apps from the standpoint of developers and cloud providers. Finally, we present several general recommendations that can guide other future works in the area of privacy for the cloud