Interaction design for online video and television

This course will teach attendees how to design and evaluate interaction with online video and television. It provides attendees a pragmatic toolset, including techniques and guidelines, which can be directly applied in practice. The different tools will be contextualized based on current developments, giving participants a complete overview of the state of the art and industry

Design and implementation of a teleoperator’s workstation

Treball desenvolupat en el marc del programa "European Project Semester".The project aims to implement a way for a teleoperator to control an existing self-driving car if the autonomous driving algorithms fail to respond to the encountered situation. The project will rely on the existing code developed by the MechLab Team at the HTW in Dresden, who have converted a BMW i3 into a self-driving car using surround and proximity sensors and a homemade software that controls the vehicle's speed and steering. The car is also able to detect pedestrians and other obstacles thanks to a deep learning algorithm dedicated to this part. Teleoperation systems pose many challenges, such as providing the teleoperator with the same level of situational awareness as a driver in the car. The driver needs to focus more on the surroundings, and therefore teleoperated drivers will have to rest more often and take more breaks. To address this challenge, the teleoperation system will use high information density sensors, including LiDAR, radar, and ultrasonic sensors, to provide the driver with an overlay of detected obstacles and the predicted path, enhancing reality to compensate for latency in communication by taking some workload off the operator. Another big challenge is to switch between the autonomous and teleoperated driving modes, as there are different problems that can appear. Most noticeably, during the time it takes for the operator to get aware of the situation and respond to the call, the car must be able to safely stop and wait for instructions from the operator. The failure to do so could result in dangerous or even deadly situations for the autonomous vehicle’s occupants as well as for the other road users, who do not need to wait for the communication to be established. One of the last great challenges is allow stable and fast communication between the car and the teleoperator. This can be achieved by narrowing the data transmitted for example by reducing video quality in predefined cases, or by ensuring redundancy in the communication media. Nevertheless, a complete loss of communication is not impossible, so a protocol needs to be defined in order to safely halt the vehicle while waiting on the reconnection of the transmission. To fulfil this project, our team will use MATLAB and Simulink in combination with different toolboxes from the MathWorks company. We will try to develop a human-machine interface for the teleoperator, implement a way for the operator to take over control of the vehicle, build scenarios to test and simulate our different programs and much more. All of this is done in order to build safer and more reliable autonomous vehicles for the future.Incomin

Linking an integrated framework with appropriate methods for measuring QoE

Quality of Experience (QoE) has recently gained recognition for being an important determinant of the success of new technologies. Despite the growing interest in QoE, research into this area is still fragmented. Similar - but separate - efforts are being carried out in technical as well as user oriented research domains, which are rarely communicating with each other. In this paper, we take a multidisciplinary approach and review both user oriented and technical definitions on Quality of Experience (including the related concept of User Experience). We propose a detailed and comprehensive framework that integrates both perspectives. Finally, we take a first step at linking methods for measuring QoE with this framework

Interaction design for online video and television

This course will teach attendees how to design and evaluate interaction with online video and television. It provides attendees a pragmatic toolset, including techniques and guidelines, which can be directly applied in practice. The different tools will be contextualized based on current developments, giving participants a complete overview of the state of the art and industry

Montpellier broom (Genista monspessulana) and Spanish broom (Spartium junceum) in South Africa: An assessment of invasiveness and options for management

AbstractThe legumes (Fabaceae) Genista monspessulana and Spartium junceum are major invaders in several other parts of the world, but not yet so in South Africa. We determine their current distributions in South Africa at different spatial scales, assess population structure (soil seed banks and size at reproduction) evaluate current management activities, and provide recommendations for control (including assessing the feasibility of nation-wide eradication). G. monspessulana occurs at nine localities in three quarter-degree cells, covering a total of 22.7ha. S. junceum is much more widespread, occurring in 33 quarter-degree cells and is frequently cultivated in private gardens. All naturalised or invasive populations are in disturbed areas, mostly along roadsides. Once established, G. monspessulana and S. junceum accumulate large, persistent soil-stored seed banks, ranging in size between 909 and 22,727 (median 1970)seeds/m2 and 0 and 21,364 (median 455)seeds/m2 for the two species respectively. Both species resprout vigorously after cutting and stump herbicide application (60% of G. monspessulana and 43% of S. junceum plants resprouted) which necessitates regular follow-ups. We estimate that over 10years, at a cost of about ZAR 81,000 (1 ZAR=0.114 US$ as on 6 October 2012), G. monspessulana could be extirpated from South Africa. S. junceum is far more widespread and coupled with low effectiveness of control, abundance of seeds and seed longevity, eradication is unfeasible. We recommend that control methods used for S. junceum be improved to prevent resprouting, and that areas are managed to limit the movement of seeds and avoid further spread and establishment. Further studies are required to understand why these two species have failed to replicate the invasiveness shown in other parts of the world

Enhancing Social Sharing of Videos: Fragment, Annotate, Enrich, and Share

Media consumption is an inherently social activity, serving to communicate ideas and emotions across both small- and large-scale communities. The migration of the media experience to personal computers retains social viewing, but typically only via a non-social, strictly personal interface. This paper presents an architecture and implementation for media content selection, content (re)organization, and content sharing within a user community that is heterogeneous in terms of both participants and devices. In addition, our application allows the user to enrich the content as a differentiated personalization activity targeted to his/her peer-group. We describe the goals, architecture and implementation of our system in this paper. In order to validate our results, we also present results from two user studies involving disjoint sets of test participants

Single NanoParticle Photothermal Tracking (SNaPT) of 5 nm gold beads in live cells

Tracking individual nano-objets in live cells during arbitrary long times is an ubiquitous need in modern biology. We present here a method for tracking individual 5 nm gold nanoparticles on live cells. It relies on the photothermal effect and the detection of the Laser Induced Scattering around a NanoAbsorber (LISNA). The key point for recording trajectories at video rate is the use of a triangulation procedure. The effectiveness of the method is tested against Single fluorescent Molecule Tracking in live COS7 cells on subsecond time scales. We further demonstrate recordings for several minutes of AMPA receptors trajectories on the plasma membrane of live neurons. SNaPT has the unique potential to record arbitrary long trajectory of membrane proteins using non-fluorescent nanometer sized labels

Chasing the ‘Killer’ Phonon Mode for the Rational Design of Low Disorder, High Mobility Molecular Semiconductors

Molecular vibrations play a critical role in the charge transport properties of weakly van der Waals bonded organic semiconductors. To understand which specific phonon modes contribute most strongly to the electron – phonon coupling and ensuing thermal energetic disorder in some of the most widely studied high mobility molecular semiconductors, we have combined state-of-the-art quantum mechanical simulations of the vibrational modes and the ensuing electron phonon coupling constants with experimental measurements of the low-frequency vibrations using inelastic neutron scattering and terahertz time-domain spectroscopy. In this way we have been able to identify the long-axis sliding motion as a ‘killer’ phonon mode, which in some molecules contributes more than 80% to the total thermal disorder. Based on this insight, we propose a way to rationalize mobility trends between different materials and derive important molecular design guidelines for new high mobility molecular semiconductors.Royal Society German Research Foundation European Research Council Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council ARCHER UK National Supercomputing Service Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research Leverhulme Trust Wiener-Anspach Foundation Belgian Walloon Region GENCI-CINES/IDRI