5628621
A context-aware infrastructure for supporting applications with pen-based interaction
Pen-based user interfaces which leverage the affordances of the pen provide users with more flexibility and natural interaction. However, it is difficult to construct usable pen-based user interfaces because of the lack of support for their development. Toolkit-level support has been exploited to solve this problem, but this approach makes it hard to gain platform independence, easy maintenance and easy extension. In this paper a context-aware infrastructure is created, called WEAVER, to provide pen interaction services for both novel pen-based applications and legacy GUI-based applications. WEAVER aims to support the pen as another standard interactive device along with the keyboard and mouse and present a high-level access interface to pen input. It employs application context to tailor its service to different applications. By modeling the application context and registering the relevant action adapters, WEAVER can offer services, such as gesture recognition, continuous handwriting and other fundamental ink manipulations, to appropriate applications. One of the distinct features of WEAVER is that off-the-shelf GUI-based software packages can be easily enhanced with pen interaction without modifying the existing code. In this paper, the architecture and components of WEAVER are described. In addition, examples and feedbacks of its use are presented.
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.
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.
5419727
Sketching informal presentations
Informal presentations are a lightweight means for fast and convenient communication of ideas. People communicate their ideas to others on paper and whiteboards, which afford fluid sketching of graphs, words and other expressive symbols. Unlike existing authoring tools that are designed for formal presentations, we created SketchPoint to help presenters design informal presentations via freeform sketching. In SketchPoint, presenters can quickly author presentations by sketching slide content, overall hierarchical structures and hyperlinks. To facilitate the transition from idea capture to communication, a note-taking workspace was built for accumulating ideas and sketching presentation outlines. Informal feedback showed that SketchPoint is a promising tool for idea communication.
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.
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.
14632183
Collection of network information in active networks
Collection of information about the state of the network is very important for applications both in active networks and in traditional passive networks. However, the existing methods for the collection and prediction of network state cannot meet the needs of complex and intelligent applications. Active networks provide an environment that supports the injection and execution of application-specified codes in the network nodes, and consequently suggest possibilities for the solving of such a problem. In this article we present a new method for the collection of network state information by describing how active network techniques can be used to collect this information more freely and in a user-specific way. We give also an implementation of this approach to collect network resource information and evaluate it by measurements. By using this method, users can specify both the content and the format of the network resource information that they want to acquire as well as nodes at which they want to gather these information.
16207650
Term Disambiguation in Natural Language Query for XML
Converting a natural language query sentence into a formal database query is a major challenge. We have constructed NaLIX, a natural language interface for querying XML data. Through our experience with NaLIX, we find that failures in natural language query understanding can often be dealt with as ambiguities in term meanings. These failures are typically the result of either the user's poor knowledge of the database schema or the system's lack of linguistic coverage. With automatic term expansion techniques and appropriate interactive feedback, we are able to resolve these ambiguities. In this paper, we describe our approach and present results demonstrating its effectiveness.
24872800
Face Recognition using Patch-based Spin Images
This paper explores how spin images can be constructed using shape-from-shading information and used for the purposes of face recognition. We commence by extracting needle-maps from gray-scale images of faces, using a mean needle-map to enforce the correct pattern official convexity and concavity. Spin images (Johnson and Hebert, 1999) are estimated from the needle maps using local spherical geometry to approximate the facial surface. Our representation is based on the spin image histograms for an arrangement of image patches. We demonstrate how this representation can be used to perform face recognition across different subjects and illumination conditions. Experiments show the method to be reliable and accurate
32047
Constructing a Generic Natural Language Interface for an XML Database
We describe the construction of a generic natural language query interface to an XML database. Our interface can accept an arbitrary English sentence as a query, which can be quite complex and include aggregation, nesting, and value joins, among other things. This query is translated, potentially after reformulation, into an XQuery expression. The translation is based on mapping grammatical proximity of natural language parsed tokens in the parse tree of the query sentence to proximity of corresponding elements in the XML data to be retrieved. Our experimental assessment, through a user study, demonstrates that this type of natural language interface is good enough to be usable now, with no restrictions on the application domain.
4975119
Diffuse-Specular Separation and Depth Recovery from Image Sequences
Specular reflections present difficulties for many areas of computer vision such as stereo and segmentation. To separate specular and diffuse reflection components, previous approaches generally require accurate segmentation, regionally uniform reflectance or structured lighting. To overcome these limiting assumptions, we propose a method based on color analysis and multibaseline stereo that simultaneously estimates the separation and the true depth of specular reflections. First, pixels with a specular component are detected by a novel form of color histogram differencing that utilizes the epipolar constraint. This process uses relevant data from all the stereo images for robustness, and addresses the problem of color occlusions. Based on the Lambertian model of diffuse reflectance, stereo correspondence is then employed to compute for specular pixels their corresponding diffuse components in other views. The results of color-based detection aid the stereo correspondence, which determines both separation and true depth of specular pixels. Our approach integrates color analysis and multibaseline stereo in a synergistic manner to yield accurate separation and depth, as demonstrated by our results on synthetic and real image sequences.