12892539
Experimental analysis of mode switching techniques in pen-based user interfaces
Inking and gesturing are two central tasks in pen-based user interfaces. Switching between modes for entry of uninterpreted ink and entry of gestures is required by many pen-based user interfaces. Without an appropriate mode switching technique, pen-based interactions in such situations may be inefficient and cumbersome. In this paper, we investigate five techniques for switching between ink and gesture modes in pen interfaces, including a pen-pressure based mode switching technique that allows implicit mode transition. A quantitative experimental study was conducted to evaluate the performance of these techniques. The results suggest that pressing a button with the non-preferred hand offers the fastest performance, while the technique of holding the pen still is significantly slower and more prone to error than the other techniques. Pressure, while promising, did not perform as well as the non-preferred hand button with our current implementation.
3968249
Topiary: a tool for prototyping location-enhanced applications
Location-enhanced applications use the location of people, places, and things to augment or streamline interaction. Location-enhanced applications are just starting to emerge in several different domains, and many people believe that this type of application will experience tremendous growth in the near future. However, it currently requires a high level of technical expertise to build location-enhanced applications, making it hard to iterate on designs. To address this problem we introduce Topiary, a tool for rapidly prototyping location-enhanced applications. Topiary lets designers create a map that models the location of people, places, and things; use this active map to demonstrate scenarios depicting location contexts; use these scenarios in creating storyboards that describe interaction sequences; and then run these storyboards on mobile devices, with a wizard updating the location of people and things on a separate device. We performed an informal evaluation with seven researchers and interface designers and found that they reacted positively to the concept.
3890576
Design and experimental analysis of continuous location tracking techniques for Wizard of Oz testing
Wizard of Oz (WOz) testing has shown promise as an effective way to test location-enhanced applications. However, it is challenging to conduct a location-based WOz test because of the dynamic nature of target settings in the field. In particular, continuous location tracking, a major task in such a test, requires a wizard to frequently update a user's location to simulate a location system. This imposes a heavy task load on a wizard. To ease wizards' tasks for location tracking, we designed two techniques, Directional Crossing and Steering, and conducted a field experiment to investigate the performance of the two techniques. A quantitative analysis shows that Directional Crossing and Steering significantly lowered a wizard's task load for location tracking without sacrificing accuracy.
8622581
BrickRoad: a light-weight tool for spontaneous design of location-enhanced applications
It is difficult to design and test location-enhancedapplications. A large part of this difficulty is due to the added complexity of supporting location. Wizard of Oz (WOz) has become an effective technique for the early stage design of location-enhanced applications because it allows designers to test an application prototype bysimulating nonexistent components such as location sensing. However, existing WOz tools 1) require nontrivial effort from designers to specify how a prototype should behave before it can be tested with end users, and 2)support only limited control over application behavior during a test. BrickRoad is a WOz tool for spontaneousdesign of location-enhanced applications. It lowers the threshold to acquiring user feedback and exploring a design space. With BrickRoad, a designer does not need to specify any interaction logic and can experiment on-the-fly with different designs during testing. BrickRoad is a valuable complement to existing tool support for the early stage design of location-enhanced applications.
53246102
Informal prototyping of continuous graphical interactions by demonstration
Informal prototyping tools have shown great potential in facilitating the early stage design of user interfaces. How-ever, continuous interactions, an important constituent of highly interactive interfaces, have not been well supported by previous tools. These interactions give continuous visual feedback, such as geometric changes of a graphical object, in response to continuous user input, such as the movement of a mouse. We built Monet, a sketch-based tool for proto-typing continuous interactions by demonstration. In Monet, designers can prototype continuous widgets and their states of interest using examples. They can also demonstrate com-pound behaviors involving multiple widgets by direct ma-nipulation. Monet allows continuous interactions to be eas-ily integrated with event-based, discrete interactions. Con-tinuous widgets can be embedded into storyboards and their states can condition or trigger storyboard transitions. Monet achieves these features by employing continuous function approximation and statistical classification techniques, without using any domain specific knowledge or assuming any application semantics. Informal feedback showed that Monet is a promising approach to enabling more complete tool support for early stage UI design.
44498059
Penbuilder: Platform for the Development of Pen-Based User Interface
Pen-based user interfaces is widely used in mobile computing environment, which provides natural, efficient interaction. It has substantial differences from any previous interface and it is difficult to be implemented. A well-designed platform will improve the development of pen-based user interface. In this paper, the architecture of Pen-Book-Page-Paper is presented, which is extended from the metaphor of Pen-Paper. Penbuilder is a development platform based on this architecture. Pen-based user interface can be constructed from three layers of Penbuilder: modal-primitive layer, task-primitive layer and task layer. Each layer provides different extent supports for flexibility and reusability. The components of the platform are discussed in detail and some properties of the platform are argued. Penbuilder is also compliant for the development of distributed user interface. In the section of discussion, we analyze the platform through task tree. The platform provides full supports for extensibility and new interactive devices can be easily added.
1877430
Mobile Robot Navigation Using Particle Swarm Optimization and Adaptive NN
This paper presents a novel design for mobile robot using particle swarm optimization (PSO) and adaptive NN control. The adaptive NN control strategy guarantees that robot with nonholonomic constraints can follow smooth trajectories. Based on this property, a PSO algorithm for path planning is proposed. The path planning generates smooth path with low computational cost to avoid obstacles, so that robot can use smooth control strategy to track the trajectory.
5262698
An integrated algorithm of incremental and robust PCA
Principal component analysis (PCA) is a well-established technique in image processing and pattern recognition. Incremental PCA and robust PCA are two interesting problems with numerous potential applications. However, these two issues have only been separately addressed in the previous studies. In this paper, we present a novel algorithm for incremental and robust PCA by seamlessly integrating the two issues together. The proposed algorithm has the advantages of both incremental PCA and robust PCA. Moreover, unlike most M-estimation based robust algorithms, it is computational efficient. Experimental results on dynamic background modelling are provided to show the performance of the algorithm with a comparison to the conventional batch-mode and nonrobust algorithms.
3052468
Performance Modeling and Analysis for Resource Scheduling in Data Grids
Data Grids normally deal with large data-intensive problems on geographically distributed resources; yet, most current research on performance evaluation of resource scheduling in Data Grids is based on simulation techniques, which can only consider a limited range of scenarios. In this paper, we propose a formal framework via Stochastic Petri Nets to deal with this problem. Within this framework, we model and analyze the performance of resource scheduling in Data Grids, allowing for a wide variety of job and data scheduling algorithms. As a result of our research, we can investigate more scenarios with multiple input parameters. Moreover, we can evaluate the combined effectiveness of job and data scheduling algorithms, rather than study them separately.
39892461
The XOO7 Benchmark
As XML becomes the standard for electronic data interchange, benchmarks are needed to provide a comparative performance analysis of XML Management Systems (XMLMS). Typically a benchmark should adhere to four criteria: relevance, portability, scalability and simplicity [1]. The data structure of a benchmark for XML must be complex enough to capture the characteristics of XML data representation. Data sets should be in various sizes. Benchmark queries should only be defined with the primitives of the language.
34644814
The Independence Number of Graphs with a Forbidden Cycle and Ramsey Numbers
Let k ≥ 5 be a fixed integer and let m = ⌊(k − 1)/2⌋. It is shown that the independence number of a Ck-free graph is at least c1[∑ d(v)1/(m − 1)](m − 1)/m and that, for odd k, the Ramsey number r(Ck, Kn) is at most c2(nm + 1/log n)1/m, where c1 = c1(m) > 0 and c2 = c2(m) > 0.