Human errors in performing security-critical tasks are typically blamed on the complexity of those tasks. However, such errors can also occur because of (possibly unexpected) sensory distractions. A sensory distraction that produces negative effects can be abused by the adversary that controls the environment. Meanwhile, a distraction with positive effects can be artificially introduced to improve user performance. The goal of this work is to explore the effects of visual stimuli on the performance of security-critical tasks. To this end, we experimented with a large number of subjects who were exposed to a range of unexpected visual stimuli while attempting to perform Bluetooth Pairing. Our results clearly demonstrate substantially increased task completion times and markedly lower task success rates. These negative effects are noteworthy, especially, when contrasted with prior results on audio distractions which had positive effects on performance of similar tasks. Experiments were conducted in a novel (fully automated and completely unattended) experimental environment. This yielded more uniform experiments, better scalability and significantly lower financial and logistical burdens. We discuss this experience, including benefits and limitations of the unattended automated experiment paradigm.
Other than recent results describing effects of audio distractions @cite_13 , we are unaware of any prior usability studies utilizing a fully automated and unattended physical environment.
@cite_13
1830858207
Author(s): Kaczmarek, T; Kobsa, A; Sy, R; Tsudik, G | Abstract: User errors while performing security-critical tasks can lead to undesirable or even disastrous consequences. One major factor influencing mistakes and failures is complexity of such tasks, which has been studied extensively in prior research. Another important issue which hardly received any attention is the impact of both accidental and intended distractions on users performing security-critical tasks. In particular, it is unclear whether, and to what extent, unexpected sensory cues (e.g., auditory or visual) can influence user behavior and or trigger mistakes. Better understanding of the effects of intended distractions will help clarify their role in adversarial models. As part of the research effort described in this paper, we administered a range of naturally occurring -- yet unexpected -- sounds while study participants attempted to perform a security-critical task. We found that, although these auditory cues lowered participants' failure rates, they had no discernible effect on their task completion times. To this end, we overview some relevant literature that explains these somewhat counter-intuitive findings. Conducting a thorough and meaningful study on user errors requires a large number of participants, since errors are typically infrequent and should not be instigated more than once per subject. To reduce the effort of running numerous subjects, we developed a novel experimental setup that was fully automated and unattended. We discuss our experience with this setup and highlight the pros and cons of generalizing its usage. Robot learning is critically enabled by the availability of appropriate state representations. We propose a robotics-specific approach to learning such state representations. As robots accomplish tasks by interacting with the physical world, we can facilitate representation learning by considering the structure imposed by physics; this structure is reflected in the changes that occur in the world and in the way a robot can effect them. By exploiting this structure in learning, robots can obtain state representations consistent with the aspects of physics relevant to the learning task. We name this prior knowledge about the structure of interactions with the physical world robotic priors. We identify five robotic priors and explain how they can be used to learn pertinent state representations. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach in simulated and real robotic experiments with distracting moving objects. We show that our method extracts task-relevant state representations from high-dimensional observations, even in the presence of task-irrelevant distractions. We also show that the state representations learned by our method greatly improve generalization in reinforcement learning. We present a new environment for computations in particle physics phenomenology employing recent developments in cloud computing. On this environment users can create and manage “virtual” machines on which the phenomenology codes tools can be deployed easily in an automated way. We analyze the performance of this environment based on “virtual” machines versus the utilization of physical hardware. In this way we provide a qualitative result for the influence of the host operating system on the performance of a representative set of applications for phenomenology calculations. The paper considers the task of recognizing environmental sounds for the understanding of a scene or context surrounding an audio sensor. A variety of features have been proposed for audio recognition, including the popular Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs) which describe the audio spectral shape. Environmental sounds, such as chirpings of insects and sounds of rain which are typically noise-like with a broad flat spectrum, may include strong temporal domain signatures. However, only few temporal-domain features have been developed to characterize such diverse audio signals previously. Here, we perform an empirical feature analysis for audio environment characterization and propose to use the matching pursuit (MP) algorithm to obtain effective time-frequency features. The MP-based method utilizes a dictionary of atoms for feature selection, resulting in a flexible, intuitive and physically interpretable set of features. The MP-based feature is adopted to supplement the MFCC features to yield higher recognition accuracy for environmental sounds. Extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of these joint features for unstructured environmental sound classification, including listening tests to study human recognition capabilities. Our recognition system has shown to produce comparable performance as human listeners. Recent research has improved our understanding of how to create strong, memorable text passwords. However, this research has generally been in the context of desktops and laptops, while users are increasingly creating and entering passwords on mobile devices. In this paper we study whether recent password guidance carries over to the mobile setting. We compare the strength and usability of passwords created and used on mobile devices with those created and used on desktops and laptops, while varying password policy requirements and input methods. We find that creating passwords on mobile devices takes significantly longer and is more error prone and frustrating. Passwords created on mobile devices are also weaker, but only against attackers who can make more than 10^13 guesses. We find that the effects of password policies differ between the desktop and mobile environments, and suggest ways to ease password entry for mobile users. For more than three and one-half decades, beginning in the early 1960s, a heavy emphasis on proof finding has been a key component of the Argonne paradigm, whose use has directly led to significant advances in automated reasoning and important contributions to mathematics and logic. The theorems studied range from the trivial to the deep, even including some that corresponded to open questions. Often the paradigm asks for a theorem whose proof is in hand but that cannot be obtained in a fully automated manner by the program in use. The theorem whose hypothesis consists solely of the Meredith single axiom for two-valued sentential (or propositional) calculus and whose conclusion is the Lukasiewicz three-axiom system for that area of formal logic was just such a theorem. Featured in this article is the methodology that enabled the program OTTER to find the first fully automated proof of the cited theorem, a proof with the intriguing property that none of its steps contains a term of the form i>n(i>n(i>t)) for any term i>t. As evidence of the power of the new methodology, the article also discusses OTTER's success in obtaining the first known proof of a theorem concerning a single axiom of Lukasiewicz. Trained human co-workers can often easily predict each other's intentions based on prior experience. When collaborating with a robot coworker, however, intentions are hard or impossible to infer. This difficulty of mental introspection makes human-robot collaboration challenging and can lead to dangerous misunderstandings. In this paper, we present a novel, object-aware projection technique that allows robots to visualize task information and intentions on physical objects in the environment. The approach uses modern object tracking methods in order to display information at specific spatial locations taking into account the pose and shape of surrounding objects. As a result, a human co-worker can be informed in a timely manner about the safety of the workspace, the site of next robot manipulation tasks, and next subtasks to perform. A preliminary usability study compares the approach to collaboration approaches based on monitors and printed text. The study indicates that, on average, the user effectiveness and satisfaction is higher with the projection based approach. Patent prior art search is a type of search in the patent domain where documents are searched for that describe the work previously carried out related to a patent application. The goal of this search is to check whether the idea in the patent application is novel. Vocabulary mismatch is one of the main problems of patent retrieval which results in low retrievability of similar documents for a given patent application. In this paper we show how the term distribution of the cited documents in an initially retrieved ranked list can be used to address the vocabulary mismatch. We propose a method for query modeling estimation which utilizes the citation links in a pseudo relevance feedback set. We first build a topic dependent citation graph, starting from the initially retrieved set of feedback documents and utilizing citation links of feedback documents to expand the set. We identify the important documents in the topic dependent citation graph using a citation analysis measure. We then use the term distribution of the documents in the citation graph to estimate a query model by identifying the distinguishing terms and their respective weights. We then use these terms to expand our original query. We use CLEF-IP 2011 collection to evaluate the effectiveness of our query modeling approach for prior art search. We also study the influence of different parameters on the performance of the proposed method. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach significantly improves the recall over a state-of-the-art baseline which uses the link-based structure of the citation graph but not the term distribution of the cited documents. A new form of document coupling called co-citation is defined as the frequency with which two documents are cited together. The co-citation frequency of two scientific papers can be determined by comparing lists of citing documents in the Science Citation Index and counting identical entries. Networks of co-cited papers can be generated for specific scientific specialties, and an example is drawn from the literature of particle physics. Co-citation patterns are found to differ significantly from bibliographic coupling patterns, but to agree generally with patterns of direct citation. Clusters of co-cited papers provide a new way to study the specialty structure of science. They may provide a new approach to indexing and to the creation of SDI profiles. Abstract A two-layer susceptible-infected-recovered unaware-aware (SIR-UA) epidemic model is presented to analyze the effect of different heterogeneous networks in a population. Random, scale-free, and small-world network topologies are tested to investigate the impact of awareness on the spread of epidemics in a two-layer network with diverse combinations of degree and structure. Susceptible and infected (both unaware and aware) individuals are associated with their neighboring nodes in a social network structure with various degree distributions. In the two-layer SIR-UA epidemic model, a virtual network represents the connections that spread information, while a physical network represents the physical social interactions that spread diseases. We test various combinations of network structures in virtual or physical networks, to understand the impact of information diffusion on the spread of epidemics in a heterogeneous network structure. Then, the effects of awareness on the spread of a disease are discussed. Finally, phase diagrams are illustrated to reveal the final regions covered by an epidemic with various network parameters. We find that a disease spreads less if the virtual social network is more connected than the network of physical connections. Mobile and embedded electronics are pervasive in today's environment. As such, it is necessary to have a natural and intuitive way for users to indicate the intent to connect to these devices from a distance. We present DopLink, an ultrasonic-based device selection approach. It utilizes the already embedded audio hardware in smart devices to determine if a particular device is being pointed at by another device (i.e., the user waves their mobile phone at a target in a pointing motion). We evaluate the accuracy of DopLink in a controlled user study, showing that, within 3 meters, it has an average accuracy of 95 for device selection and 97 for finding relative device position. Finally, we show three applications of DopLink: rapid device pairing, home automation, and multi-display synchronization. Developing and testing algorithms for autonomous vehicles in real world is an expensive and time consuming process. Also, in order to utilize recent advances in machine intelligence and deep learning we need to collect a large amount of annotated training data in a variety of conditions and environments. We present a new simulator built on Unreal Engine that offers physically and visually realistic simulations for both of these goals. Our simulator includes a physics engine that can operate at a high frequency for real-time hardware-in-the-loop (HITL) simulations with support for popular protocols (e.g. MavLink). The simulator is designed from the ground up to be extensible to accommodate new types of vehicles, hardware platforms and software protocols. In addition, the modular design enables various components to be easily usable independently in other projects. We demonstrate the simulator by first implementing a quadrotor as an autonomous vehicle and then experimentally comparing the software components with real-world flights. Historically, papers have been physically bound to the journal in which they were published; but in the digital age papers are available individually, no longer tied to their respective journals. Hence, papers now can be read and cited based on their own merits, independently of the journal's physical availability, reputation, or impact factor (IF). We compare the strength of the relationship between journals' IFs and the actual citations received by their respective papers from 1902 to 2009. Throughout most of the 20th century, papers' citation rates were increasingly linked to their respective journals' IFs. However, since 1990, the advent of the digital age, the relation between IFs and paper citations has been weakening. This began first in physics, a field that was quick to make the transition into the electronic domain. Furthermore, since 1990 the overall proportion of highly cited papers coming from highly cited journals has been decreasing and, of these highly cited papers, the proportion not coming from highly cited journals has been increasing. Should this pattern continue, it might bring an end to the use of the IF as a way to evaluate the quality of journals, papers, and researchers. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Mobile devices are more and more integrated in workflows, especially when interacting with stationary resources like machines in order to improve productivity or usability, but risk unauthorized access or unwanted unattended operation. Systems for location based access control have been developed to restrict the user to be in specific locations in order to proceed in a workflow. However, these approaches do not consider the movement pattern of a user nor do they distinguish the severity of false-positives that might arise from imperfect location measurements which is crucial in certain workflows. In this paper, focusing on mobile users interacting with stationary machines, an approach for workflow policies is presented using three types of location constraints to enforce movement patterns. The evaluation of these constraints is based on a user’s location history which is generated in a tamper-proof environment on his mobile device and describes his geographical trajectory for a given timespan. Video based facial expression recognition has been a long standing problem and attracted growing attention recently. The key to a successful facial expression recognition system is to exploit the potentials of audiovisual modalities and design robust features to effectively characterize the facial appearance and configuration changes caused by facial motions. We propose an effective framework to address this issue in this paper. In our study, both visual modalities (face images) and audio modalities (speech) are utilized. A new feature descriptor called Histogram of Oriented Gradients from Three Orthogonal Planes (HOG-TOP) is proposed to extract dynamic textures from video sequences to characterize facial appearance changes. And a new effective geometric feature derived from the warp transformation of facial landmarks is proposed to capture facial configuration changes. Moreover, the role of audio modalities on recognition is also explored in our study. We applied the multiple feature fusion to tackle the video-based facial expression recognition problems under lab-controlled environment and in the wild, respectively. Experiments conducted on the extended Cohn-Kanade (CK+) database and the Acted Facial Expression in Wild (AFEW) 4.0 database show that our approach is robust in dealing with video-based facial expression recognition problems under lab-controlled environment and in the wild compared with the other state-of-the-art methods. The prospect of simpler infrastructure management and affordability has garnered interest in cloud computing from bioinformaticians. However, the performance cost of adopting such an infrastructure model for bioinformatics is not fully known. In an effort to help quantify this performance cost, we ran synthetic benchmarks and measured the runtimes of two short-read alignment applications on cloud-like virtualization environments. The environments were implemented utilizing the KVM hypervisor, the Xen hypervisor, and Linux Containers. We compare the runtime in each environment against a physical server and offer discussion and insights. Though the applications perform similar operations, we observe that their performance characteristics differ, as do their performance in the different virtualized environments. We attribute the differences to the way that these programs utilize system resources. We find that the more CPU-bound Novo align is much less sensitive to virtualization environments than BWA is, and has near-physical server performance even when virtualized. Additionally, we find that static CPU pinning can improve performance, and we demonstrate that Linux Containers offer performance comparable to that of a physical server. In implementations of neuromorphic computing systems (NCS), memristor and its crossbar topology have been widely used to realize fully connected neural networks. However, many neural networks utilized in real applications often have a sparse connectivity, which is hard to be efficiently mapped to a crossbar structure. Moreover, the scale of the neural networks is normally much larger than that can be offered by the latest integration technology of memristor crossbars. In this work, we propose AutoNCS -- an EDA framework that can automate the NCS designs that combine memristor crossbars and discrete synapse modules. The connections of the neural networks are clustered to improve the utilization of the memristor elements in crossbar structures by taking into account the physical design cost of the NCS. Our results show that AutoNCS can substantially enhance the utilization efficiency of memristor crossbars while reducing the wirelength, area and delay of the physical designs of the NCS. This article shows how statistical motion priors can be combined seamlessly with physical constraints for human motion modeling and generation. The key idea of the approach is to learn a nonlinear probabilistic force field function from prerecorded motion data with Gaussian processes and combine it with physical constraints in a probabilistic framework. In addition, we show how to effectively utilize the new model to generate a wide range of natural-looking motions that achieve the goals specified by users. Unlike previous statistical motion models, our model can generate physically realistic animations that react to external forces or changes in physical quantities of human bodies and interaction environments. We have evaluated the performance of our system by comparing against ground-truth motion data and alternative methods. For a robot, the ability to get from one place to another is one of the most basic skills. However, locomotion on legged robots is a challenging multidimensional control problem. This paper presents a machine learning approach to legged locomotion, with all training done on the physical robots. The main contributions are a specification of our fully automated learning environment and a detailed empirical comparison of four different machine learning algorithms for learning quadrupedal locomotion. The resulting learned walk is considerably faster than all previously reported hand-coded walks for the same robot platform. Preface. Part I: AN INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY OF NONVERBAL COMMUNICATION. 1. Nonverbal Communication: Basic Perspectives. 2. The Roots of Nonverbal Behavior. 3. The Ability to Receive and Send Nonverbal Signals. Part II: THE COMMUNICATION ENVIRONMENT. 4. The Effects of the Environment on Human Communication. 5. The Effects of Territory and Personal Space on Human Communication. Part III: THE COMMUNICATORS. 6. The Effects of Physical Characteristics on Human Communication. Part IV: The Communicators' Behavior. 7. The Effects of Gesture and Posture on Human Communication. 8. The Effects of Touch on Human Communication. 9. The Effects of the Face on Human Communication. 10. The Effects of Eye Behavior on Human Communication. 11. The Effects of Vocal Cues That Accompany Spoken Words. Part V: COMMUNICATING IMPORTANT MESSAGES. 12. Using Nonverbal Behavior in Daily Interaction. 13. Nonverbal Messages in Special Contexts.