Augmented Reality Interfaces for Procedural Tasks

Procedural tasks involve people performing established sequences of activities while interacting with objects in the physical environment to accomplish particular goals. These tasks span almost all aspects of human life and vary greatly in their complexity. For some simple tasks, little cognitive assistance is required beyond an initial learning session in which a person follows one-time compact directions, or even intuition, to master a sequence of activities. In the case of complex tasks, procedural assistance may be continually required, even for the most experienced users. Approaches for rendering this assistance employ a wide range of written, audible, and computer-based technologies. This dissertation explores an approach in which procedural task assistance is rendered using augmented reality. Augmented reality integrates virtual content with a user's natural view of the environment, combining real and virtual objects interactively, and aligning them with each other. Our thesis is that an augmented reality interface can allow individuals to perform procedural tasks more quickly while exerting less effort and making fewer errors than other forms of assistance. This thesis is supported by several significant contributions yielded during the exploration of the following research themes: What aspects of AR are applicable and beneficial to the procedural task problem? In answering this question, we developed two prototype AR interfaces that improve procedural task accomplishment. The first prototype was designed to assist mechanics carrying out maintenance procedures under field conditions. An evaluation involving professional mechanics showed our prototype reduced the time required to locate procedural tasks and resulted in fewer head movements while transitioning between tasks. Following up on this work, we constructed another prototype that focuses on providing assistance in the underexplored psychomotor phases of procedural tasks. This prototype presents dynamic and prescriptive forms of instruction and was evaluated using a demanding and realistic alignment task. This evaluation revealed that the AR prototype allowed participants to complete the alignment more quickly and accurately than when using an enhanced version of currently employed documentation systems. How does the user interact with an AR application assisting with procedural tasks? The application of AR to the procedural task problem poses unique user interaction challenges. To meet these challenges, we present and evaluate a novel class of user interfaces that leverage naturally occurring and otherwise unused affordances in the native environment to provide a tangible user interface for augmented reality applications. This class of techniques, which we call Opportunistic Controls, combines hand gestures, overlaid virtual widgets, and passive haptics to form an interface that was proven effective and intuitive during quantitative evaluation. Our evaluation of these techniques includes a qualitative exploration of various preferences and heuristics for Opportunistic Control-based designs

Year 2015 Aircraft Emission Scenario for Scheduled Air Traffic

This report describes the development of a three-dimensional scenario of aircraft fuel burn and emissions (fuel burned, NOx, CO, and hydrocarbons)for projected year 2015 scheduled air traffic. These emission inventories are available for use by atmospheric scientists conducting the Atmospheric Effects of Aviation Project (AEAP) modeling studies. Fuel burned and emissions of nitrogen oxides (NOx as NO2), carbon monoxides, and hydrocarbons have been calculated on a 1 degree latitude x 1 degree longitude x 1 kilometer altitude grid and delivered to NASA as electronic files

Raven Eye: A Mobile Computing Solution for Site Exploitation

Site exploitation (SE) remains a critical mission for operators on the battlefield.  Since SE is a fairly new operation in the military, soldiers face specific challenges that hinder them from conducting a successful SE operation.  This paper details the design of a system, Raven Eye, which endeavors to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of SE.  Raven Eye is an Android based system that collects, stores, and sends SE data.  Raven Eye allows operators to collect exploited site data by capturing photos, videos, and biometrics.  Operators can annotate and tag recorded items.  Lastly, the operators transform data stored and collected via Raven Eye to a standardized report that accelerates follow-on analysis by intelligence personnel. 

INSPIRING STUDENTS TO UNLEASH SIMPLE TECHNOLOGICAL TOOLS TO PROVIDE BETTER DATA ANALYSIS TO DECISION MAKERS

ABSTRACT In an era of technological advances, the proliferation of large-scale datasets is both an asset and a challenge for decision makers

Sustaining Educational Reforms in Introductory Physics

While it is well known which curricular practices can improve student performance on measures of conceptual understanding, the sustaining of these practices and the role of faculty members in implementing these practices are less well understood. We present a study of the hand-off of Tutorials in Introductory Physics from initial adopters to other instructors at the University of Colorado, including traditional faculty not involved in physics education research. The study examines the impact of implementation of Tutorials on student conceptual learning across eight first-semester, and seven second-semester courses, for fifteen faculty over twelve semesters, and includes roughly 4000 students. It is possible to demonstrate consistently high, and statistically indistinguishable, student learning gains for different faculty members; however, such results are not the norm, and appear to rely on a variety of factors. Student performance varies by faculty background - faculty involved in, or informed by physics education research, consistently post higher student learning gains than less-informed faculty. Student performance in these courses also varies by curricula used - all semesters in which the research-based Tutorials and Learning Assistants are used have higher student learning gains than those semesters that rely on non-research based materials and do not employ Learning Assistants.Comment: 21 pages, 4 figures, and other essential inf

Energy minimization of paired composite fermion wave functions in the spherical geometry

We perform the energy minimization of the paired composite fermion (CF) wave functions, proposed by M¨oller and Simon (MS) [PRB 77, 075319 (2008)] and extended by Yutushui and Mross (YM) [PRB 102, 195153 (2020)], where the energy is minimized by varying the CF pairing function, in the case of an approximate model of the Coulomb interaction in the second Landau level for pairing channels ℓ = −1, 3, 1 which are expected to be in the Pfaffian, anti-Pfaffian and particle-hole symmetric (PH) Pfaffian phases respectively. It is found that the energy of the ℓ = −1 MS wave function can be reduced substantially below that of the Moore-Read wave function at small system sizes, however, in the ℓ = 3 case the energy cannot be reduced much below that of the YM trial wave function. Nonetheless, both our optimized and unoptimized wave functions with ℓ = −1, 3 extrapolate to roughly the same energy per particle in the thermodynamic limit. For the ℓ = 1 case, the optimization makes no qualitative difference and these PH-Pfaffian wave functions are still energetically unfavourable. The effective CF pairing is analyzed in the resulting wave functions, where the effective pairing for the ℓ = −1, 3 channels is found to be well approximated by a weak-pairing BCS ansatz and the ℓ = 1 wave functions show no sign of emergent CF pairing

The Gene That Encodes the Herpes Simplex Virus Type 1 Latency-Associated Transcript Influences the Accumulation of Transcripts (Bcl-x\u3csub\u3eL\u3c/sub\u3e and Bcl-x\u3csub\u3es\u3c/sub\u3e) That Encode Apoptotic Regulatory Proteins

The herpes simplex virus type 1 latency-associated transcript (LAT) inhibits apoptosis. We demonstrate here that LAT influences the accumulation of the Bcl-xL transcript versus the Bcl-xS transcript in Neuro-2A cells. Bcl-xL encodes an antiapoptotic protein, whereas Bcl-xS encodes a proapoptotic protein. Promoting the accumulation of Bcl-xL in neurons may inhibit apoptosis, thus enhancing the latency-reactivation cycle

The Gene That Encodes the Herpes Simplex Virus Type 1 Latency-Associated Transcript Influences the Accumulation of Transcripts (Bcl-x\u3csub\u3eL\u3c/sub\u3e and Bcl-x\u3csub\u3es\u3c/sub\u3e) That Encode Apoptotic Regulatory Proteins

The herpes simplex virus type 1 latency-associated transcript (LAT) inhibits apoptosis. We demonstrate here that LAT influences the accumulation of the Bcl-xL transcript versus the Bcl-xS transcript in Neuro-2A cells. Bcl-xL encodes an antiapoptotic protein, whereas Bcl-xS encodes a proapoptotic protein. Promoting the accumulation of Bcl-xL in neurons may inhibit apoptosis, thus enhancing the latency-reactivation cycle

MRC2014: Extensions to the MRC format header for electron cryo-microscopy and tomography

Open Access funded by Medical Research CouncilThe MRC binary file format is widely used in the three-dimensional electron microscopy field for storing image and volume data. Files contain a header which describes the kind of data held, together with other important metadata. In response to advances in electron microscopy techniques, a number of variants to the file format have emerged which contain useful additional data, but which limit interoperability between different software packages. Following extensive discussions, the authors, who represent leading software packages in the field, propose a set of extensions to the MRC format standard designed to accommodate these variants, while restoring interoperability. The MRC format is equivalent to the map format used in the CCP4 suite for macromolecular crystallography, and the proposal also maintains interoperability with crystallography software. This Technical Note describes the proposed extensions, and serves as a reference for the standard.We thank Chris Booth and Steffen Meyer from Gatan Inc. for clarifying the format definition used by Digital Micrograph. Acknowledgement for support from National Institute of Health, USA includes: NIGMS grant P41GM103310 (AC and SD), NIBIB grant 5R01-EB005027 (DM), and R01GM080139 (SJL). RH and MW would like to thank the UK Medical Research Council for the award of Partnership Grant MR/J000825/1 to support the establishment of CCP-EM. RH and JS are also supported by MRC grant U105184322

Validation of a Medicare Claims-based Algorithm for Identifying Breast Cancers Detected at Screening Mammography

The breast cancer detection rate is a benchmark measure of screening mammography quality, but its computation requires linkage of mammography interpretive performance information with cancer incidence data. A Medicare claims-based measure of detected breast cancers could simplify measurement of this benchmark and facilitate mammography quality assessment and research