7053531
Attention meter: a vision-based input toolkit for interaction designers
This paper shows how a software toolkit can allow graphic designers to make camera-based interactive environments in a short period of time without experience in user interface design or machine vision. The Attention Meter, a vision-based input toolkit, gives users an analysis of faces found in a given image stream, including facial expression, body motion, and attentive activities. This data is fed to a text file that can be easily understood by humans and programs alike. A four day workshop demonstrated that some Flash-savvy architecture students could construct interactive spaces (e.g. TaiKer-KTV and ScreamMarket) based on body and head motions.
38028125
Lover's cups: drinking interfaces as new communication channels
This paper shows how computer interfaces can enhance common activities and use them as communication method between people. In this paper, the act of drinking is used as an input of remote communication with the support of computer interfaces. We present Lover's Cups which enable people to share the time of drinking with someone they care about in different places. Using a wireless connection, an otherwise ordinary pair of cups becomes a communication device, amplifying the social aspect of drinking behavior.
16256064
Emotionally reactive television
When is an interface simple? Is it when it is invisible or very obvious, even intrusive? From the time TV was created, watching TV is considered as a static activity. TV audiences have very limited choices to interact with TV, such as turning on/off, increasing/decreasing volume, and traversing among different channels. This paper suggests that TV program should have social responses to people, such as affording and accepting audience's emotional feeling with the growth of technologies. This paper presents HiTV, an Emotionally-Reactive TV system using a digitally augmented soft ball as affect-input interfaces that can amplify TV program's video/audio signals. HiTV transforms the original video and audio into effects that intrigue and fulfill people's emotional expectation.
19284732
Smart sinks: real-world opportunities for context-aware interaction
Can implicit interaction with a computer easily drive useful interface improvements in physical world settings? This paper presents a case study presenting multiple such context-aware interaction improvements in a sink. We have identified opportunities where automated interfaces at the sink have positive consequences for safety, hygiene and ecology. The danger of scalding oneself with hot water is confronted by transforming the water into a graphical user interface and using image understanding to dispense the proper temperature of water. Audio-visual feedback at the sink can motivate users to conserve water. Used in combination with an RFID reader, the sink can serve as an effective means of verifying hand-washing compliance for clean environments. Finally, automatic actuation of the sink's height based on the user and task can prevent burns and ergonomic injuries. This project demonstrates that the integration of digital interaction in a hostile environment can facilitate and improve our daily rituals.
32239506
An intelligent fuzzy agent for meeting scheduling decision support system
Abstract An Intelligent Fuzzy Agent for Meeting Scheduling Decision Support System is proposed in this paper. The proposed Intelligent Fuzzy Agent including Meeting Negotiation Agent, Fuzzy Inference Agent and Genetic Learning Agent can search and decide the suitable meeting time for the specified meeting in an organization. When a meeting host requests a meeting, the Meeting Negotiation Agent immediately sends the invitees’ names to Meeting Scheduling Decision Support System for retrieving their schedules from Group Calendar Data Base, then Meeting Scheduling Decision Support System will compute the possible meeting time and respond the results to Meeting Negotiation Agent. Moreover, the Fuzzy Inference Agent infers the adequate meeting time based on the information provided by Meeting Negotiation Agent and Personalized Knowledge Base, and sends the computing result back to Meeting Scheduling Decision Support System. The meeting host will decide the final meeting time based on Meeting Scheduling Decision Support System and announce the meeting information by various devices including PDA, WAP, FAX, or E-mail. Furthermore, the invitees’ decisions for attending the meeting or not will be stored into Meeting Information Knowledge Base, then the Genetic Learning Agent will adjust the Personalized Knowledge Base for the next meeting. By the experimental results, the proposed Intelligent Fuzzy Agent can work efficiently and effectively for Meeting Scheduling Decision Support System.
5320438
On quality of service optimization with discrete QoS options
We present a QoS management framework that enables us to quantitatively measure QoS, and to analytically plan and allocate resources. In this model, end users' quality preferences are considered when system resources are apportional across multiple applications such that the net utility that accrues to the end-users is maximized. We previously worked with continuous QoS dimensions, and assumed that the utility gained by improvements along a QoS dimension were always representable by concave functions. In this paper we relax both assumptions. One, we support discrete QoS operating points. Two, we make no assumptions about the concavity of the utility functions. Using these as the basis, we tackle the problem of maximizing system utility by allocating a single finite resource to satisfy the QoS requirements of multiple applications along multiple QoS dimensions. We present two near-optimal algorithms to solve this problem. The first yields an allocation within a known bounded distance from the optimal solution, and the second yields an allocation whose distance from the optimal solution can be explicitly controlled by the QoS manager, We compare the run-times of these near-optimal algorithms and their solution quality relative to the optimal allocation, which in turn is computed using dynamic programming. These detailed evaluations provide practical insight into which of these algorithms can be used online in real-time systems.
11365059
Vertex-transformation streams
Recent trends in parallel computer architecture strongly suggest the need to improve the arithmetic intensity (the compute to bandwidth ratio) for greater performance in time-critical applications, such as interactive 3D graphics. At the same time, advances in stream programming abstraction for graphics processors (GPUs) have enabled us to use parallel algorithm design methods for GPU programming. Inspired by these developments, this paper explores the interactions between multiple data streams to improve arithmetic intensity and address the input geometry bandwidth bottleneck for interactive 3D graphics applications. We introduce the idea of creating vertex and transformation streams that represent large point datasets via their interaction. We discuss how to factor such point datasets into a set of source vertices and transformation streams by identifying the most common translations amongst vertices. We accomplish this by identifying peaks in the cross-power spectrum of the dataset in the Fourier domain. We validate our approach by integrating it with a view-dependent point rendering system and show significant improvements in input geometry bandwidth requirements as well as rendering frame rates.
205046494
Run-time support For parallel functional programming on shared-memory multiprocessors
Abstract The use of functional languages for parallel computing has been proposed for many years. Many functional languages were developed along with the design of new architectures such as data flow and reduction machines. In this article, we present a general model of a run-time system for a parallel functional language called SISAL, to be executed on shared-memory multiprocessors. The implementation of this run-time system is examined on two radically different architectures: a 32-way (symmetrical) VAX Research Multiprocessor M31 and a 4-way Cray X-MP system. To properly evaluate the effectiveness of SISAL on shared-memory multiprocessors, we suggest further research explore an interactive visual control mechanism that dynamically shows run-time behavior.
5702505
Contextual recognition of head gestures
Head pose and gesture offer several key conversational grounding cues and are used extensively in face-to-face interaction among people. We investigate how dialog context from an embodied conversational agent (ECA) can improve visual recognition of user gestures. We present a recognition framework which (1) extracts contextual features from an ECA's dialog manager, (2) computes a prediction of head nod and head shakes, and (3) integrates the contextual predictions with the visual observation of a vision-based head gesture recognizer. We found a subset of lexical, punctuation and timing features that are easily available in most ECA architectures and can be used to learn how to predict user feedback. Using a discriminative approach to contextual prediction and multi-modal integration, we were able to improve the performance of head gesture detection even when the topic of the test set was significantly different than the training set.