SymbolDesign: A User-centered Method to Design Pen-based Interfaces and Extend the Functionality of Pointer Input Devices

A method called "SymbolDesign" is proposed that can be used to design user-centered interfaces for pen-based input devices. It can also extend the functionality of pointer input devices such as the traditional computer mouse or the Camera Mouse, a camera-based computer interface. Users can create their own interfaces by choosing single-stroke movement patterns that are convenient to draw with the selected input device and by mapping them to a desired set of commands. A pattern could be the trace of a moving finger detected with the Camera Mouse or a symbol drawn with an optical pen. The core of the SymbolDesign system is a dynamically created classifier, in the current implementation an artificial neural network. The architecture of the neural network automatically adjusts according to the complexity of the classification task. In experiments, subjects used the SymbolDesign method to design and test the interfaces they created, for example, to browse the web. The experiments demonstrated good recognition accuracy and responsiveness of the user interfaces. The method provided an easily-designed and easily-used computer input mechanism for people without physical limitations, and, with some modifications, has the potential to become a computer access tool for people with severe paralysis.National Science Foundation (IIS-0093367, IIS-0308213, IIS-0329009, EIA-0202067

Energy Efficiency of Network Cooperation for Cellular Uplink Transmissions

There is a growing interest in energy efficient or so-called "green" wireless communication to reduce the energy consumption in cellular networks. Since today's wireless terminals are typically equipped with multiple network access interfaces such as Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and cellular networks, this paper investigates user terminals cooperating with each other in transmitting their data packets to a base station (BS) by exploiting the multiple network access interfaces, referred to as inter-network cooperation, to improve the energy efficiency in cellular uplink transmission. Given target outage probability and data rate requirements, we develop a closed-form expression of energy efficiency in Bits-per-Joule for the inter-network cooperation by taking into account the path loss, fading, and thermal noise effects. Numerical results show that when the cooperating users move towards to each other, the proposed inter-network cooperation significantly improves the energy efficiency as compared with the traditional non-cooperation and intra-network cooperation. This implies that given a certain amount of bits to be transmitted, the inter-network cooperation requires less energy than the traditional non-cooperation and intra-network cooperation, showing the energy saving benefit of inter-network cooperation.Comment: in Proceedings of the 2013 IEEE International Conference on Communications (IEEE ICC 2013), Budapest, Hungary, June 201

Evaluación del rendimiento del servicio de videostreaming adaptativo en redes inalámbricas

YouTube Live is one of the most popular services on the Internet, enabling an easy streaming of a live video with acceptable video quality. Thus, understanding user´s perception of this service is of the utmost importance for network operators. The image Quality delivered and user videoplayback behavior on YouTube Live streaming are important keys to ensure an adequate Quality of Experience (QoE). In this paper, an analytical model, and stacked Bar Graph to estimate the QoE for encrypted YouTube Live service from packet-level data collected in the interfaces of a wireless network is presented. The inputs to the model are Transport Control Protocol (TCP)/Internet Protocol (IP) metrics, from which two Service Key Performance Indicators (S-KPIs) are estimated, namely video quality level (itag) and, videoplayback connection ratio. The model is developed with an experimental platform, consisting of a user terminal agent, a WiFi wireless network, a network-level emulator, a Mitmproxy and a probe software. Model assessment is carried out by comparing S-KPI estimates with measurements from the terminal agent under different network conditions introduced by the network emulator.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech. Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (Proyecto TEC2015-69982-R, UNMA13-1E-1864), y FEDER

Designing a Better User Interface with a Context Path: An Empirical Study on User Learning Styles

This paper primarily examines the differences between how various users with different learning style preferences interact with computers in the global hypertext information network of the World Wide Web. Is it possible to design user interfaces that are equally effective for all the various computer users? This study was undertaken with two main goals in mind. Two aspects of research findings from empirical studies on usability of user interfaces on the World Wide Web are that: (1) it examines users who have varied styles of learning from visual, audio, to kinesthetic and their interactions with various user interfaces; and (2) it compares task performance, confidence, and satisfaction among various user interfaces on the Web. Implications of these results for various interfaces are discussed

XML Interfaces to the Internet of Things

The internet of things is predicated on tiny, cheap, lower power computers being embedded in devices everywhere. However such tiny devices by definition have very little memory and computing power available to support user interfaces or extended servers, and so the user interface needs to be distributed over the network. This paper describes techniques using standard technologies based on XML for creating remote user interfaces for the Internet of Thing