Another Look at a Model for Evaluating Interface Aesthetics

Gestalt psychologists promulgated the principles of visual organisation in the early twentieth century. These principles have been discussed and re-emphasised, and their importance and relevance to user interface design is understood. However, a limited number of systems represent and make adequate use of this knowledge in the form of a design tool that supports certain aspects of the user interface design process. The graphic design rules that these systems use are extremely rudimentary and often vastly oversimplified. Most of them have no concept of design basics such as visual balance or rhythm. In this paper, we attempt to synthesize the guidelines and empirical data related to the formatting of screen layouts into a well-defined model. Fourteen aesthetic characteristics have been selected for that purpose. The results of our exercise suggest that these characteristics are important to prospective viewers

Random Multispace Quantization as an Analytic Mechanism for BioHashing of Biometric and Random Identity Inputs

Biometric analysis for identity verification is becoming a widespread reality. Such implementations necessitate large-scale capture and storage of biometric data, which raises serious issues in terms of data privacy and (if such data is compromised) identity theft. These problems stem from the essential permanence of biometric data, which (unlike secret passwords or physical tokens) cannot be refreshed or reissued if compromised. Our previously presented biometric-hash framework prescribes the integration of external (password or token-derived) randomness with user-specific biometrics, resulting in bitstring outputs with security characteristics (i.e., noninvertibility) comparable to cryptographic ciphers or hashes. The resultant BioHashes are hence cancellable, i.e., straightforwardly revoked and reissued (via refreshed password or reissued token) if compromised. BioHashing furthermore enhances recognition effectiveness, which is explained in this paper as arising from the Random Multispace Quantization (RMQ) of biometric and external random inputs

Biometric hash: high-confidence face recognition

In this paper, we describe a biometric hash algorithm for robust extraction of bits from face images. While a face-recognition system has high acceptability, its accuracy is low. The problem arises because of insufficient capability of representing features and variations in data. Thus, we use dimensionality reduction to improve the capability to represent features, error correction to improve robustness with respect to within-class variations, and random projection and orthogonalization to improve discrimination among classes. Specifically, we describe several dimensionality-reduction techniques with biometric hashing enhancement for various numbers of bits extracted. The theoretical results are evaluated on the FERET face database showing that the enhanced methods significantly outperform the corresponding raw methods when the number of extracted bits reaches 100. The improvements of the postprocessing stage for principal component analysis (PCA), Wavelet Transform with PCA, Fisher linear discriminant, Wavelet Transform, and Wavelet Transform with Fourier-Mellin Transform are 98.02%, 95.83%, 99.46%, 99.16%, and 100%, respectively. The proposed technique is quite general, and can be applied to other biometric templates. We anticipate that this algorithm will find applications in cryptographically secure biometric authentication schemes

A Method for Determining the Properties of Multi-Screen Interfaces

An important aspect of screen design is aesthetic evaluation of screen layouts. While it is conceivable to define a set of variables that characterize the key attributes of many alphanumeric display formats, such a task seems difficult for graphic displays because of their much greater complexity. This article proposes a theoretical approach to capture the essence of artists' insights with seven aesthetic measures for graphic displays. The formalized measures include symmetry, sequence, cohesion, regularity, homogeneity, rhythm, and order and complexity. The paper concludes with some thoughts on the direction which future research should take

Formative computer based assessment in diagram based domains

This paper presents an approach to conducting formative assessment of student coursework within diagram-based domains using Computer Based Assessment (CBA) technology. Formative assessment is perceived as a resource-intensive assessment mode and its usage is in steep decline in higher education. CBA technology developed out of the desire to automate assessment due to the necessity of assessing students with decreasing unit-resource; it can overcome the decline in formative assessment by automating those processes which are considered resource-intensive.The system described is based upon the CourseMarker CBA system (formerly CourseMaster / Ceilidh) and the DATsys object-oriented framework for CBA-oriented diagram editors. This paper outlines requirements for obtaining good formative assessment using CBA software and documents a live system which assessed student Entity Relationship diagrams within an undergraduate Database Systems course. Results are presented and considerable extensions proposed