Wrist-worn pervasive gaze interaction

This paper addresses gaze interaction for smart home control, conducted from a wrist-worn unit. First we asked ten people to enact the gaze movements they would propose for e.g. opening a door or adjusting the room temperature. On basis of their suggestions we built and tested different versions of a prototype applying off-screen stroke input. Command prompts were given to twenty participants by text or arrow displays. The success rate achieved by the end of their first encounter with the system was 46% in average; it took them 1.28 seconds to connect with the system and 1.29 seconds to make a correct selection. Their subjective evaluations were positive with regard to the speed of the interaction. We conclude that gaze gesture input seems feasible for fast and brief remote control of smart home technology provided that robustness of tracking is improved

Monarchia hebrea

Datos de ed. preceden a la información complementaria del tít.Marca tip. en port.Sign.: A-Z\p8\s, 2A-2B\p8\s

Monarchia hebrea

Datos de ed. preceden a la información complementaria del tít.Marca tip. en port.Sign.: A-Z\p8\s, 2A-2B\p8\s

Molecular excitation in the Interstellar Medium: recent advances in collisional, radiative and chemical processes

We review the different excitation processes in the interstellar mediumComment: Accepted in Chem. Re

Beauty in the blink of an eye: The time course of aesthetic experiences

Under normal circumstances, perception runs very fast and seemingly automatic. In just a few ms, we go from sensory features to perceiving objects. This fast time course does not only apply to general perceptual aspects but also to what we call higher-level judgements. Inspired by the study on 'very first impressions' by Bar, Neta, and Linz (2006, Emotion, 6, 269) the current research examined the speed and time course of three aspects of the aesthetic experience, namely beauty, specialness, and impressiveness. Participants were presented with 54 reproductions of paintings that covered a wide variety of artistic styles and contents. Presentation times were 10, 50, 100 and 500 ms in Experiment 1 and 20, 30 and 40 ms in Experiment 2. Our results not only show that consistent aesthetic judgements can be formed based on very brief glances of information, but that this speed of aesthetic impression formation also differs between different aesthetic judgements. Apparently, impressiveness judgements require longer exposure times than impressions of beauty or specialness. The results provide important evidence for our understanding of the time course of aesthetic experiences.status: publishe

Comparison of Tools for Simplified Life Cycle Assessment in Mechanical Engineering

International audienceCurrent trends indicate that Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) tools are going to be extremely important for companies in the forthcoming years. New laws and standards are increasingly taking environmental aspects into account but, for non-experts in LCA, it can be difficult to find software suited to their studies. This paper aims to analyze the ability of simplified LCA software to combine a simple and convenient interface with relevant and exploitable results. This work tries to show which LCA tools are usable in preliminary analysis performed by non-experts like students in mechanical engineering or designers. Various assessments were studied with different tools: ArtoACV, Ecodesign Studio, Bilan Produit, and Umberto LCA+. An evaluation grid was drawn up to compare the tools according to objective and non-objective criteria. The case studies were carried out separately in order to remain as objective as possible. In this paper, the studies were made by two students in the first year of a Master's degree in mechanical engineering at INSA Toulouse. This paper shows that the four software packages enable a preliminary LCA to be finalized and propose graphs and tables for a better understanding of results. Even though tools generally allow the users to reach the same conclusions, some parameters persist that can strongly influence the result. Designers should keep in mind that results may not be consistent for their projects and may depend strongly on the hypothesis of the study

Food for an Urban Planet: Challenges and Research Opportunities

In 2014, Khoo and Knorr (1) identified the global shift in population demographics as one of the twenty-first century grand challenges, which warrants research prioritization by the food and nutrition communities. A persistent global growth trend toward urbanization can be attributed to this demographic shift. Satterthwaite et al. (2) characterized urbanization as “the increasing share of a nation’s population living in urban areas (and thus a declining share living in rural areas)” and stated that “Most urbanization is the result of net rural to urban migration, decline in rural population and gain in urban populations giving rise to megacities.” The global urban population is projected to increase by 1.84% per year between 2015 and 2020, by 1.63% between 2020 and 2025, and by 1.44% between 2025 and 2030. In 2016, 54% of the global population resided in urban areas; this is expected to rise to 60% by 2030, meaning that one in every three people will live in cities with more than half a million inhabitants. Meanwhile, the rural population is projected to decline from 45 to 40% between 2016 and 2030 (3) (Table 1). By 2050, more than 6.5 billion of the expected 9.6 billion global population will live in megacities with 10 million or more inhabitants, meaning that nearly two out of three individuals will be city dwellers (4–7)