Pervasive Displays Research: What's Next?

Reports on the 7th ACM International Symposium on Pervasive Displays that took place from June 6-8 in Munich, Germany

Predicting the Failure of Developmental Gold Mining Projects

This paper investigates firm-level financial and non-financial information and their association with project failure for a sample of pre-production gold development firms. Pre-revenue generating 'single project' mining companies are chosen, since project failure is synonymous with company failure for these firms. The setting is interesting due to the high information asymmetry and limitations of the GAAP-based Altman Z-score in this context. A definition of project failure is applied and both financial and non-financial predictors are compared. Failure is driven by whether the deposit is open pit or underground, and whether the cash cost of production is disclosed at feasibility completion. © 2011 CPA Australia

What is the best way to evaluate an acute traumatic knee injury?

The Ottawa Knee Rules can guide the use of radiography in adults who present with isolated knee pain. However, information on use of these rules in the pediatric population is limited (strength of recommendation [SOR ]: A, based on systematic review of high-quality studies and a validated clinical decision rule). Specific physical examination maneuvers (such as the Lachman and McMurray tests) may be helpful when assessing for meniscal or ligamentous injury (SOR : C, based on studies of intermediate outcomes)

Mobile applications for open display networks : common design considerations

Mobile devices can be a powerful tool for interaction with public displays, but mobile applications supporting this form of interaction are not yet part of our everyday reality. There are no widely accepted abstractions, standards, or practices that may enable systematic interaction between mobile devices and public displays. We envision public displays to move away from a world of closed display networks to scenarios where mobile applications could allow people to interact with the myriad of displays they might encounter during their everyday trips. In this research, we study the key processes involved in this collaborative interaction between public shared displays and mobile applications. Based on the lessons learned from our own development and deployment of 3 applications, and also on the analysis of the interactive features described in the literature, we have identified 8 key processes that may shape this form of interaction: Discovery, Association, Presence Management, Exploration, Interface Migration, Controller, Media Upload and Media Download. The contribution of this work is the identification of these high-level processes and an elicitation of the main design considerations for display networks.(undefined

Automated assessment of movement impairment in Huntington's disease

Quantitative assessment of movement impairment in Huntington’s disease (HD) is essential to monitoring of disease progression. This study aimed to develop and validate a novel low cost, objective automated system for the evaluation of upper limb movement impairment in HD in order to eliminate the inconsistency of the assessor and offer a more sensitive, continuous assessment scale. Patients with genetically confirmed HD and healthy controls were recruited to this observational study. Demographic data including age (years), gender and Unified Huntington’s Disease Rating Scale Total Motor Score (UHDRS-TMS) were recorded. For the purposes of this study a modified upper limb motor impairment score (mULMS) was generated from the UHDRS-TMS. All participants completed a brief, standardized clinical assessment of upper limb dexterity whilst wearing a tri-axial accelerometer on each wrist and on the sternum. The captured acceleration data were used to develop an automatic classification system for discriminating between healthy and HD participants and to automatically generate a continuous Movement Impairment Score (MIS) that reflected the degree of the movement impairment. Data from 48 healthy and 44 HD participants was used to validate the developed system, which achieved 98.78% accuracy in discriminating between healthy and HD participants. The Pearson correlation coefficient between the automatic MIS and the clinician rated mULMS was 0.77 with a p-value < 0.01. The approach presented in this study demonstrates the possibility of an automated objective, consistent and sensitive assessment of the HD movement impairment

Are you feeling lucky?:lottery-based scheduling for public displays

Scheduling content onto pervasive displays is a complex problem. Researchers have identified an array of potential requirements that can influence scheduling decisions, but the relative importance of these different requirements varies across deployments, with context, and over time. In this paper we describe the design and implementation of a lottery-based scheduling approach that allows for the combination of multiple scheduling policies and is easily extensible to accommodate new scheduling requirements

Lifelogging user study:bystander privacy

Automatically and passively taking pictures (using lifelogging devices such as wearable cameras) of people who don’t know they’re having their picture taken raises a number of privacy concerns (from a bystander’s perspective). We conducted a study focussing on the bystanders’ concerns to the presence of augmented reality wearable devices in two contexts (one formal and one informal). The results suggests the need to embed privacy enhancing techniques into the design of lifelogging applications, which are likely to depend upon an array of factors, but not limited to the context of use, scenario (and surroundings), and content