StateLens: A Reverse Engineering Solution for Making Existing Dynamic Touchscreens Accessible

Blind people frequently encounter inaccessible dynamic touchscreens in their everyday lives that are difficult, frustrating, and often impossible to use independently. Touchscreens are often the only way to control everything from coffee machines and payment terminals, to subway ticket machines and in-flight entertainment systems. Interacting with dynamic touchscreens is difficult non-visually because the visual user interfaces change, interactions often occur over multiple different screens, and it is easy to accidentally trigger interface actions while exploring the screen. To solve these problems, we introduce StateLens - a three-part reverse engineering solution that makes existing dynamic touchscreens accessible. First, StateLens reverse engineers the underlying state diagrams of existing interfaces using point-of-view videos found online or taken by users using a hybrid crowd-computer vision pipeline. Second, using the state diagrams, StateLens automatically generates conversational agents to guide blind users through specifying the tasks that the interface can perform, allowing the StateLens iOS application to provide interactive guidance and feedback so that blind users can access the interface. Finally, a set of 3D-printed accessories enable blind people to explore capacitive touchscreens without the risk of triggering accidental touches on the interface. Our technical evaluation shows that StateLens can accurately reconstruct interfaces from stationary, hand-held, and web videos; and, a user study of the complete system demonstrates that StateLens successfully enables blind users to access otherwise inaccessible dynamic touchscreens.Comment: ACM UIST 201

Economic losses due to ozone impacts on human health, forest productivity and crop yield across China

China's economic growth has significantly increased emissions of tropospheric ozone (O3) precursors, resulting in increased regional O3 pollution. We analyzed data from >1400 monitoring stations and estimated the exposure of population and vegetation (crops and forests) to O3 pollution across China in 2015. Based on WHO metrics for human health protection, the current O3 level leads to +0.9% premature mortality (59,844 additional cases a year) with 96% of populated areas showing O3–induced premature death. For vegetation, O3 reduces annual forest tree biomass growth by 11–13% and yield of rice and wheat by 8% and 6%, respectively, relative to conditions below the respective AOT40 critical levels (CL). These CLs are exceeded over 98%, 75% and 83% of the areas of forests, rice and wheat, respectively. Using O3 exposure–response functions, we evaluated the costs of O3-induced losses in rice (7.5 billion US$), wheat (11.1 billion US$) and forest production (52.2 billion US$) and SOMO35–based morbidity for respiratory diseases (690.9 billion US$) and non–accidental mortality (7.5 billion US$), i.e. a total O3-related cost representing 7% of the China Gross Domestic Product in 2015. Keywords: Surface ozone, Human health, Wheat, Rice, Forests, Crops, Risk assessment, Impacts, Economic valuatio

Iterative decodable block codes for high-speed free space optical communication

This paper investigates the performance of high-rate block codes in log-normal fading atmospheric channel based on the discussion of channel characteristics. Several block codes are under study, especially two kinds of iterative decoding codes with high code rate and low encoder/decoder complexity: Hamming-based TPC codes and block circulant based LDPC codes. The code types selection and iterative decoding algorithms for the two codes are discussed. The performance of several codes under different turbulence strength are also reported. Both TPC and LDPC codes can achieve impressive coding gain based on theoretical analysis and extensive computer simulation. In term of superior property in coding gain, error floor effect and hardware implementation, we recommend TPCs as FEC scheme for FSO system.http://gateway.webofknowledge.com/gateway/Gateway.cgi?GWVersion=2&SrcApp=PARTNER_APP&SrcAuth=LinksAMR&KeyUT=WOS:000275815600043&DestLinkType=FullRecord&DestApp=ALL_WOS&UsrCustomerID=8e1609b174ce4e31116a60747a720701Engineering, Electrical & ElectronicTelecommunicationsEICPCI-S(ISTP)

Pyrolysis characteristics of fat from Nannochloropsis sp. and its effect on pyrolysis of all components

The pyrolysis of microalgae to produce bio-oil is one of the most promising technologies on renewable energy resources. Bio-oil is a kind of clean biological energy resource with high energy density and similar chemical composition to the diesel fuel. During the process of pyrolysis, microalgae produces great amount of nitrogen-containing compound, which causes NOx emissions during combustion. However, pyrolysis of microalgae was still remained in its all components investigation at present. Therefore, the pyrolysis of a single component will make full use of microalgae resources. The crude fat was employed as raw material, which was extracted from Nannochloropsis sp. by using acid hydrolyzation method. Two kinds of feedstocks, namely crude fat and all components, were pyrolyzed in a fixed bed reactor, and the effect of temperature and heating rate on the yield and properties of the two groups of bio-oil were investigated. It showed that the fat in the Nannochloropsis sp. increased the yield and properties of bio-oil when pyrolyze all components. Moreover, with the increase in temperature and heating rate, the yield and properties of bio-oil from crude fat and all components followed the same varying trend, and their best properties were obtained at 20℃/min,600℃. Compared with pyrolysis of all components, the deoxidizing ratio and the content of carbon, hydrogen elements in crude fat after being pyrolyzed were higher, therefore the properties could be further improved with the increase of fat in the Nannochloropsis sp.

Joint Raindrop and Haze Removal from a Single Image

In a recent study, it was shown that, with adversarial training of an attentive generative network, it is possible to convert a raindrop degraded image into a relatively clean one. However, in real world, raindrop appearance is not only formed by individual raindrops, but also by the distant raindrops accumulation and the atmospheric veiling, namely haze. Current methods are limited in extracting accurate features from a raindrop degraded image with background scene, the blurred raindrop regions, and the haze. In this paper, we propose a new model for an image corrupted by the raindrops and the haze, and introduce an integrated multi-task algorithm to address the joint raindrop and haze removal (JRHR) problem by combining an improved estimate of the atmospheric light, a modified transmission map, a generative adversarial network (GAN) and an optimized visual attention network. The proposed algorithm can extract more accurate features for both sky and non-sky regions. Experimental evaluation has been conducted to show that the proposed algorithm significantly outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms on both synthetic and real-world images in terms of both qualitative and quantitative measures

Blind Multiple Input Multiple Output Image Phase Retrieval

In this paper, we consider the problem of recovering the phase information of the multiple images from the multiple mixed phaseless Short-Time Fourier Transform (STFT) image measurements, which is called the blind multiple input multiple output image phase retrieval (BMIPR) problem. It is an inherently ill-posed problem due to the lack of the phase and mixing information, and the existing phase retrieval algorithms are not explicitly designed for this case. To address the BMIPR phase retrieval problem, an integrated algorithm is presented, which combines a gradient descent (GD) algorithm by minimizing a nonconvex loss function with an independent component analysis (ICA) algorithm and a non-local means (NM) algorithm. Experimental evaluation has been conducted to show that under appropriate conditions the proposed algorithms can explicitly recover the images, the phases of the images and the mixing matrix. In addition, the algorithm is robust to noise

ID6101 Airline Aisle Chair re-design

Aisle Chair Project Summary - Team 2ID6101 in Spring 2013 engaged various stakeholders to assess and re-design aisle chairs used to transport persons with disabilities onto and off of aircraft. These are the executive summaries from each Team.Stephen Sprigl