Enhancing user interface accessibility using computer vision

Accessibility features for vision-impaired users are typically provided by oral readouts of on-screen icons or other material. The task of transcribing in-app icons to text for text-to-speech conversion is typically left to the app developer. Icon-to-speech translation for apps from developers that are not conscious of the need to make their products accessible is often unsatisfactory. For example, a refresh button and a back button may both simply be transcribed as “button,” which is unhelpful to a vision-impaired user. This disclosure uses computer vision techniques to automatically infer, and provide to a vision-impaired user, text corresponding to UI elements, e.g., icons, dropdown boxes, sliders, buttons, etc. The techniques are advantageously implemented on a platform over which apps operate, e.g., operating system, browser, etc., such that vision-impaired users can access UI elements even if the app developer did not transcribe in-app icons to text

Displaying Summary for Skipped Advertisements

Online audio and video playback services often include advertisements that are played before content requested by a user. Advertisements can be on a substantial duration, e.g., 30 seconds. Many services provide an option for the user to skip the ad after a shorter duration, e.g., 5 seconds. In such situations, a user may not see the advertised product or brand if it isn’t included in the initial portion of the advertisement. This disclosure describes techniques to display an advertisement summary, e.g., one or more video frames or a portion of audio, for a short duration of time, e.g., 100-250ms when a user skips an advertisement. The advertisement summary can be provided by the advertiser, or determined automatically from the frames from the advertisement by applying one or more classifiers

Non-deterministic video frame sampling to thwart frame insertion attacks

Accurate machine understanding of videos is important, e.g., to maintain the integrity and policy compliance of videos at a video hosting website. For example, a video-hosting website with a policy of hosting only family-friendly videos deploys video understanding systems to automatically exclude non-compliant videos. Techniques of image analysis are applied to individual video frames to understand the video. Due to the computational cost of processing individual frames, videos are sampled, e.g., at a rate of one frame per second, and only the sampled frames are subjected to image analysis. Sampling-based video understanding is susceptible to attack. For example, such systems fail to detect a non-compliant video, if the video includes policy-compliant frames inserted to match sampling instants. This disclosure utilizes randomization of sampling instants to thwart frame insertion attacks that attempt to mask actual video content. Randomized sampling for video understanding also assures reproducibility such that the understanding of the video is independent of the sampling instants

Stakeholder views about Land Use and Transport Integration in a rapidly-growing megacity:Social outcomes and integrated planning issues in Seoul

Land use and transport integration (LUTI) has been promoted around the world as essential for sustainable urbanization. Using Seoul as a case study, this paper critically examines if and how LUTI policy can bring positive social outcomes, including accessibility and quality of life, in rapidly-growing megacities. We explored stakeholder views about the experience of these outcomes in different localities, and about critical elements and processes needed to enhance social outcomes. Our research identified that facilitating compact urban form around transport nodes does not guarantee increased accessibility or livelihood opportunities. The outcomes are closely related to the quality of development around nodes, accessibility to public facilities, local mobility, and functionality of pedestrian paths. Ensuring sustainability of social outcomes from LUTI approach requires: balancing restrictions and incentives to control quality of development around nodes; creating cost-effective strategies to maintain local environmental quality; applying flexible rules to address varying priorities and opportunities in different localities; and multi-level planning that balances the responsibilities of metropolitan and local stakeholders to facilitate desired outcomes. We conclude that, in rapidly-growing cities, a flexible and holistic approach to integration should be applied to reflect diverse needs and local circumstances and to ensure fair benefits across the city

Photothermal Polymer Nanocomposites of Tungsten Bronze Nanorods with Enhanced Tensile Elongation at Low Filler Contents

We present polymer nanocomposites of tungsten bronze nanorods (TBNRs) and ethylene propylene diene monomers (EPDM). The combination of these components allows the simultaneous enhancement in the mechanical and photothermal properties of the composites at low filler contents. The as-synthesized TBNRs had lengths and diameters of 14.0 +/- 2.4 nm and 2.5 +/- 0.5 nm, respectively, and were capped with oleylamine, which has a chemical structure similar to EPDM, making the TBNRs compatible with the bulk EPDM matrix. The TBNRs absorb a wide range of near-infrared light because of the sub-band transitions induced by alkali metal doping. Thus, the nanocomposites of TBNRs in EPDM showed enhanced photothermal properties owing to the light absorption and subsequent heat emission by the TBNRs. Noticeably, the nanocomposite with only 3 wt% TBNRs presented significantly enhanced tensile strain at break, in comparison with those of pristine EPDM, nanocomposites with 1 and 2 wt % TBNRs, and those with tungsten bronze nanoparticles, because of the alignment of the nanorods during tensile elongation. The photothermal and mechanical properties of these nanocomposites make them promising materials for various applications such as in fibers, foams, clothes with cold weather resistance, patches or mask-like films for efficient transdermal delivery upon heat generation, and photoresponsive surfaces for droplet transport by the thermocapillary effect in microfluidic devices and microengines