2523816
The kinedit system: affective messages using dynamic texts
Kinetic (dynamic) typography has demonstrated the ability to add significant emotive content and appeal to expressive text, allowing some of the qualities normally found in film and the spoken word to be added to static text. Kinetic typography has been widely and successfully used in film title sequences as well as television and computer-based advertising. However, its communicative abilities have not been widely studied, and its potential has rarely been exploited outside these areas. This is partly due to the difficulty in creating kinetic typography with current tools, often requiring hours of work to animate a single sentence.In this paper, we present the Kinedit system, a basic authoring tool that takes initial steps toward remedying this situation and hence promoting exploration of the communicative potential of kinetic typography for personal communication. Kinedit is informed by systematic study and characterization of a corpus of examples, and iterative involvement and validation by designers throughout the development process. We describe the tool and its underlying technology, usage experiences, lessons learned, and next steps.
37265440
RFIG lamps: interacting with a self-describing world via photosensing wireless tags and projectors
This paper describes how to instrument the physical world so that objects become self-describing, communicating their identity, geometry, and other information such as history or user annotation. The enabling technology is a wireless tag which acts as a radio frequency identity and geometry (RFIG) transponder. We show how addition of a photo-sensor to a wireless tag significantly extends its functionality to allow geometric operations - such as finding the 3D position of a tag, or detecting change in the shape of a tagged object. Tag data is presented to the user by direct projection using a handheld locale-aware mobile projector. We introduce a novel technique that we call interactive projection to allow a user to interact with projected information e.g. to navigate or update the projected information.The ideas are demonstrated using objects with active radio frequency (RF) tags. But the work was motivated by the advent of unpowered passive-RFID, a technology that promises to have significant impact in real-world applications. We discuss how our current prototypes could evolve to passive-RFID in the future.
3162456
Predicting human interruptibility with sensors
A person seeking another person's attention is normally able to quickly assess how interruptible the other person currently is. Such assessments allow behavior that we consider natural, socially appropriate, or simply polite. This is in sharp contrast to current computer and communication systems, which are largely unaware of the social situations surrounding their usage and the impact that their actions have on these situations. If systems could model human interruptibility, they could use this information to negotiate interruptions at appropriate times, thus improving human computer interaction.This article presents a series of studies that quantitatively demonstrate that simple sensors can support the construction of models that estimate human interruptibility as well as people do. These models can be constructed without using complex sensors, such as vision-based techniques, and therefore their use in everyday office environments is both practical and affordable. Although currently based on a demographically limited sample, our results indicate a substantial opportunity for future research to validate these results over larger groups of office workers. Our results also motivate the development of systems that use these models to negotiate interruptions at socially appropriate times.
15601356
An optimal proportion of perfect repair
At each failure of a system, with probability p it is perfectly repaired, and with probability 1-p it is restored to its condition just prior to failure. It is shown that there exists a unique p minimizing the long-run repair cost, provided the failure time distribution of the system has strictly DMRL.
7307952
Optimal variable-density k-space sampling in MRI
Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is often times limited by scan time. To reduce scan time, there have been various efforts to reduce the number of sampling points. In most cases, this is done by utilizing a priori knowledge of the signal of interest. In this paper, we propose an algorithm that will guide the determination of an optimal sampling pattern based on prior knowledge of the signal. Applications of this method include optimal variable-density k-space trajectory design or reduced phase encoding in 3DFT and spectroscopy. Preliminary results are shown as a proof of concept.
9094168
Microscopic examination of TCP flows over transatlantic links
Much of the recent research and development in the area of high-speed TCP is focused on the steady state behavior of TCP flows. However, our experience with the first research only transatlantic 2.5 Gbps Lambda link clearly demonstrates the need to focus on the initial stages of TCP. The work we present here examines the behavior of TCP flows at microscopic level over high-bandwidth long delay networks. This examination has led us to study the influence of the minute properties of the underlying network on bursty protocols such as TCP at these very high speeds combined with high latency. In this paper we briefly describe the requirements for such an extreme network environment to support high-speed TCP flows. We also present results collected using transatlantic links at iGrid2002 where we tuned various host parameters and used modified TCP stacks.
16343799
Synchronization with multiprocessor caches
Introducing private caches in bus-based shared memory multiprocessors leads to the cache consistency problem since there may be multiple copies of shared data. However, the ability to snoop on the bus coupled with the fast broadcast capability allows the design of special hardware support for synchronization. We present a new lock-based cache scheme which incorporates synchronization into the cache coherency mechanism. With this scheme high-level synchronization primitives as well as low-level ones can be implemented without excessive overhead. Cost functions for well-known synchronization methods are derived for invalidation schemes, write update schemes, and our lock-based scheme. To accurately predict the performance implications of the new scheme, a new simulation model is developed embodying a widely accepted paradigm of parallel programming. It is shown that our lock-based protocol outperforms existing cache protocols.
14452578
Automatically mapping code on an intelligent memory architecture
This paper presents an algorithm to automatically map code on a generic intelligent memory system that consists of a host processor and a simpler memory processor. To achieve high performance with this type of architecture, code needs to be partitioned and scheduled such that each section is assigned to the processor on which it runs most efficiently. In addition, the two processors should overlap their execution as much as possible. With our algorithm, applications are mapped fully automatically using both static and dynamic information. Using a set of standard applications and a simulated architecture, we show average speedups of 1.7 for numerical applications and 1.3 for nonnumerical applications over a single host with plain memory. The speedups are very close and often higher than ideal speedups on a more expensive multiprocessor system composed of two identical host processors. Our work shows that heterogeneity can be cost-effectively exploited and represents one step toward effectively mapping code on intelligent memory systems.