17369120
Informing Public Deliberation: Value Sensitive Design of Indicators for a Large-scale Urban Simulation
We investigate informing public deliberation regarding major land use and transportation decisions with the results from a sophisticated computer simulation of urban development. Our specific focus is on indicators that portray key results from the simulations. Our design addresses a number of challenges, including responding to the values and interests of diverse stakeholders, making documentation ready-to-hand, and balancing the value of fairness with presenting a diverse set of advocacy positions. We use Value Sensitive Design as our theory and design methodology; our theoretical framework also draws on Habermas's theories of legitimation and communicative action. Our work contributes to CSCW as an example of designing a system for effective use in an environment with multiple stakeholders who have fundamental disagreements, and we conclude by drawing lessons for other environments with these characteristics.
736283
System support for pervasive applications
Pervasive computing provides an attractive vision for the future of computing. Computational power will be available everywhere. Mobile and stationary devices will dynamically connect and coordinate to seamlessly help people in accomplishing their tasks. For this vision to become a reality, developers must build applications that constantly adapt to a highly dynamic computing environment. To make the developers' task feasible, we present a system architecture for pervasive computing, called <i>one.world</i>. Our architecture provides an integrated and comprehensive framework for building pervasive applications. It includes services, such as discovery and migration, that help to build applications and directly simplify the task of coping with constant change. We describe our architecture and its programming model and reflect on our own and others' experiences with using it.
3804028
Household indicators: design to inform and engage citizens
Urban simulation systems can be a powerful tool for helping to understand the complex, long-term consequences of urban planning decisions. Simulation results are summarized and reported using indicators, aggregate measures such as population density or total minutes of vehicle delay. To citizens, these indicators may seem abstract and unfamiliar. This extended abstract presents design work in progress on Household Indicators, a new form of indicator designed especially for citizens. Accessed through a web-based interface, Household Indicators are intended to inform citizens by relating simulation results to citizens' life experiences, and to engage citizens by addressing the question, "How will this decision affect me?.
37350008
On Edge-Disjoint Spanning Trees in Hypercubes
In this note we give a construction for obtaining the maximum number of edge-disjoint spanning trees in a hypercube. The result has applications to multicast communication in wormhole-routed parallel computers.
17800570
A Robust Human-Silhouette Extraction Technique for Interactive Virtual Environments
In this paper, we present a method for robustly extracting the silhouette form of the participant within an interactive environment. The approach overcomes the inherent problems associated with traditional chroma-keying, background subtraction, and rear-light projection methods. We employ a specialized infrared system while not making the underlying technology apparent to those interacting within the environment. The design also enables multiple video projection screens to be placed around the user. As an example use of this technology, we present an interactive virtual aerobics system. Our current implementation is a portable system which can act as a re-usable infrastructure for many interactive projects.
1126755
Creating Shared Information Spaces to Support Collaborative Design Work
The provision of computer support for collaborative work is a central concern for Information Systems (IS) research and practice. In this paper we present the details of an information flow study undertaken in the household division of a large European design and manufacturing company (Delta). The goal of the study was to elicit user requirements for a computer system to facilitate the collaborative work of new product design teams. These requirements form the basis for the design and development of a Web-based LIRÉ (Living Repository) prototype system, the functionalities, features, and rationale of which are discussed. We also present the results of the evaluation of LIRÉ by the users at Delta and our observations on enhancing the sophistication and usefulness of this class of system. A production version based on the prototype but using commercially available software is currently in use by the New Product Development group at Delta.
239186
Recognizing human action efforts: an adaptive three-mode PCA framework
We present a computational framework capable of labeling the effort of an action corresponding to the perceived level of exertion by the performer (low - high). The approach initially factorizes examples (at different efforts) of an action into its three-mode principal components to reduce the dimensionality. Then a learning phase is introduced to compute expressive-feature weights to adjust the model's estimation of effort to conform to given perceptual labels for the examples. Experiments are demonstrated recognizing the efforts of a person carrying bags of different weight and for multiple people walking at different paces.
15670831
An expressive three-mode principal components model of human action style
We present a three-mode expressive-feature model for representing and recognizing performance styles of human actions. A set of style variations for an action are initially arranged into a three-mode data representation (body pose, time, style) and factored into its three-mode principal components to reduce the data dimensionality. We next embed tunable weights on trajectories within the sub-space model to enable different context-based style estimations. We outline physical and perceptual parameterization methods for choosing style labels for the training data, from which we automatically learn the necessary expressive weights using a gradient descent procedure. Experiments are presented examining several motion-capture walking variations corresponding to carrying load, gender, and pace. Results demonstrate a greater flexibility of the expressive three-mode model, over standard squared-error style estimation, to adapt to different style matching criteria.
12006498
Computing depth under ambient illumination using multi-shuttered light
Range imaging has become a critical component of many computer vision applications. The quality of the depth data is of critical importance, but so is the need for speed. Shuttered light-pulse (SLP) imaging uses active illumination hardware to provide high quality depth maps at video frame rates. Unfortunately, current analytical models for deriving depth from SLP imagers are specific to the number of shutters and have a number of deficiencies. As a result, depth estimation often suffers from bias due to object reflectivity, incorrect shutter settings, or strong ambient illumination such as that encountered outdoors. These limitations make SLP imaging unsuitable for many applications requiring stable depth readings. This paper introduces a method that is general to any number of shutters. Using three shutters, the new method produces invariant estimates under changes in ambient illumination, producing high quality depth maps in a wider range of situations.