Exploring computer-generated line graphs through virtual touch

This paper describes the development and evaluation of a haptic interface designed to provide access to line graphs for blind or visually impaired people. Computer-generated line graphs can be felt by users through the sense of touch produced by a PHANToM force feedback device. Experiments have been conducted to test the effectiveness of this interface with both sighted and blind people. The results show that sighted and blind people have achieved about 89.95% and 86.83% correct answers respectively in the experiment

ASAP : towards accurate, stable and accelerative penetrating-rank estimation on large graphs

Pervasive web applications increasingly require a measure of similarity among objects. Penetrating-Rank (P-Rank) has been one of the promising link-based similarity metrics as it provides a comprehensive way of jointly encoding both incoming and outgoing links into computation for emerging applications. In this paper, we investigate P-Rank efficiency problem that encompasses its accuracy, stability and computational time. (1) We provide an accuracy estimate for iteratively computing P-Rank. A symmetric problem is to find the iteration number K needed for achieving a given accuracy ε. (2) We also analyze the stability of P-Rank, by showing that small choices of the damping factors would make P-Rank more stable and well-conditioned. (3) For undirected graphs, we also explicitly characterize the P-Rank solution in terms of matrices. This results in a novel non-iterative algorithm, termed ASAP , for efficiently computing P-Rank, which improves the CPU time from O(n 4) to O( n 3 ). Using real and synthetic data, we empirically verify the effectiveness and efficiency of our approaches

Giant dispersion of critical currents in superconductor with fractal clusters of a normal phase

The influence of fractal clusters of a normal phase on the dynamics of a magnetic flux trapped in a percolative superconductor is considered. The critical current distribution and the current-voltage characteristics of fractal superconducting structures in the resistive state are obtained for an arbitrary fractal dimension of the cluster boundaries. The range of fractal dimensions, where the dispersion of critical currents becomes infinite, is found. It is revealed that the fractality of clusters depresses of the electric field caused by the magnetic flux motion thus increasing the critical current value. It is expected that the maximum current-carrying capability of a superconductor can be achieved in the region of giant dispersion of critical currents.Comment: 7 pages with 3 figure