Twitter and other social media platforms are often used for sharing interest in products. The identification of purchase decision stages, such as in the AIDA model (Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action), can enable more personalized e-commerce services and a finer-grained targeting of ads than predicting purchase intent only. In this paper, we propose and analyze neural models for identifying the purchase stage of single tweets in a user's tweet sequence. In particular, we identify three challenges of purchase stage identification: imbalanced label distribution with a high number of negative instances, limited amount of training data, and domain adaptation with no or only little target domain data. Our experiments reveal that the imbalanced label distribution is the main challenge for our models. We address it with ranking loss and perform detailed investigations of the performance of our models on the different output classes. In order to improve the generalization of the models and augment the limited amount of training data, we examine the use of sentiment analysis as a complementary, secondary task in a multitask framework. For applying our models to tweets from another product domain, we consider two scenarios: For the first scenario without any labeled data in the target product domain, we show that learning domain-invariant representations with adversarial training is most promising while for the second scenario with a small number of labeled target examples, finetuning the source model weights performs best. Finally, we conduct several analyses, including extracting attention weights and representative phrases for the different purchase stages. The results suggest that the model is learning features indicative of purchase stages and that the confusion errors are sensible.

Managing post-surgical pain is critical for successful surgical outcomes. One of the challenges of pain management is accurately assessing the pain level of patients. Self-reported numeric pain ratings are limited because they are subjective, can be affected by mood, and can influence the patient’s perception of pain when making comparisons. In this paper, we introduce an approach that analyzes 2D and 3D facial keypoints of post-surgical patients to estimate their pain intensity level.Our approach leverages the previously unexplored capabilities of a smartphone to capture a dense3D representation of a person’s face as input for pain intensity level estimation. Our contributions are a data collection study with post-surgical patients to collect ground-truth labeled sequences of2D and 3D facial keypoints for developing a pain estimation algorithm, a pain estimation model that uses multiple instance learning to overcome inherent limitations in facial keypoint sequences, and the preliminary results of the pain estimation model using 2D and 3D features with comparisons of alternate approaches.

Flow-like experiences at work are important for productivity and worker well-being. However, it is difficult to objectively detect when workers are experiencing flow in their work. In this paper, we investigate how to predict a worker's focus state based on physiological signals. We conducted a lab study to collect physiological data from knowledge workers experienced different levels of flow while performing work tasks. We used the nine characteristics of flow to design tasks that would induce different focus states. A manipulation check using the Flow Short Scale verified that participants experienced three distinct flow states, one overly challenging non-flow state, and two types of flow states, balanced flow, and automatic flow. We built machine learning classifiers that can distinguish between non-flow and flow states with 0.889 average AUC and rest states from working states with 0.98 average AUC. The results show that physiological sensing can detect focused flow states of knowledge workers and can enable ways to for individuals and organizations to improve both productivity and worker satisfaction.

Contrastive learning (CL) is an emerging analysis approach that aims to discover unique patterns in one dataset relative to another. By applying this approach to network analysis, we can reveal unique characteristics in one network by contrasting with another. For example, with networks of protein interactions obtained from normal and cancer tissues, we can discover unique types of interactions in cancer tissues. However, existing CL methods cannot be directly applied to networks. To address this issue, we introduce a novel approach called contrastive network representation learning (cNRL). This approach embeds network nodes into a low-dimensional space that reveals the uniqueness of one network compared to another. Within this approach, we also propose a method, named i-cNRL, that offers interpretability in the learned results, allowing for understanding which specific patterns are found in one network but not the other. We demonstrate the capability of i-cNRL with multiple network models and real-world datasets. Furthermore, we provide quantitative and qualitative comparisons across i-cNRL and other potential cNRL algorithm designs.

An important capability of most smart, Internet-of-Things-enabled spaces (e.g., office, home, hospital, factory) is the ability to leverage context of use. This can support social awareness, allowing people to interact more effectively which each other. Location is a key context element; particularly indoor location. Recent advances in radio ranging technologies, such as 802.11-2016 FTM, promise the availability of low-cost, near-ubiquitous time-of-flight-based ranging estimates. In this paper, we build on prior work to enhance this ranging technology's ability to provide useful location estimates. For further improvements, we model user-motion behavior to estimate the user motion state by taking the temporal measurements available from time-of-flight ranging. We select the velocity parameter of a particle-filter-based on this motion state. We demonstrate meaningful improvements in coordinate-based estimation accuracy and substantial increases in room-level estimation accuracy. Furthermore, insights gained in our real-world deployment provides important implications for future Internet of Things context applications and their supporting technology deployments such as social interaction, workflow management, inventory control, or healthcare information tools.

The demands of daily work offer few opportunities for workers to take stock of their own progress, big or small, which can lead to lower motivation, engagement, and higher risk of burnout. We present Highlight Matome, a personal online tool that encourages workers to quickly record and rank a single work highlight each day, helping them gain awareness of their own successes. We describe results from a field experiment investigating our tool's effectiveness for improving workers' engagement, perceptions, and affect. Thirty-three knowledge workers in Japan and the U.S. used Highlight Matome for six weeks. Our results show that using our tool for less than one minute each day significantly increased measures of work engagement, dedication, and positivity. A qualitative analysis of the highlights offers a window into participants' emotions and perceptions. We discuss implications for theories of inner work life and worker well-being.

There is a growing need for effective remote communication, which has many positive societal impacts, such as reducing environmental pollution and travel costs, supporting rich collaboration by remotely connecting talented people. Social Virtual Reality (VR) invites multiple users to join a collaborative virtual environment, which creates new opportunities for remote communication. The goal of social VR is not to completely replicate reality, but to facilitate and extend the existing communication channels of the physical world. Apart from the benefits provided by social VR, privacy concerns and ethical risks are raised when the boundary between the real and the virtual world is blurred. This workshop is intended to spur discussions regarding technology, evaluation protocols, application areas, research ethics and legal regulations for social VR as an emerging immersive remote communication tool.

While it is often critical for indoor-location- and proximity-aware applications to know whether a user is in a space or not (e.g., a specific room or office), a key challenge is that the difference between standing on one side or another of a doorway or wall is well within the error range of most RF-based approaches. In this work, we address this challenge by augmenting RF-based localization and proximity detection with active ultrasonic sensing, taking advantage of the limited propagation of sound waves. This simple and cost-effective approach can allow, for example, a Bluetooth smart-lock to discern whether a user is inside or outside their home. We describe a configurable architecture for our solution and present experiments that validate this approach but also demonstrate that different user behavior and application needs can impact system configuration decisions. Finally, we describe applications that could benefit from our solution and address privacy concerns.

This paper reports our explorations on learning Sensory Media Association through Reciprocating Training (SMART). The proposed learning system contains two deep autoencoders, one for learning speech representations and another for learning image representations. Two deep networks are trained to bridge the latent spaces of two autoencoders, yielding representation mappings for both speech-to-image and image-to-speech. To improve feature clustering in both latent spaces, the system alternately uses one modality to guide the learning of another modality. Different from traditional technology that uses a fixed modality for supervision (e.g. using text labels for image classification), the proposed approach facilitates a machine to learn from sensory data of two or more modalities through alternating guidance among these modalities. We evaluate the proposed model with MNIST digit images and corresponding digit speeches in the Google Command Digit Dataset (GCDD). We also evaluate the model with a dataset based on COIL-100 and corresponding Watson synthesized speech. The results demonstrate the model's promising viability for sensory media association.

We present a remote assistance system that enables a remotely located expert to provide guidance using hand gestures to a customer who performs a physical task in a different location. The system is built on top of a web-based real-time media communication framework which allows the customer to use a commodity smartphone to send a live video feed to the expert, from which the expert can see the view of the customer's workspace and can show his/her hand gestures over the video in real-time. The expert's hand gesture is captured with a hand tracking device and visualized with a rigged 3D hand model on the live video feed. The system can be accessed via a web browser, and it does not require any app software to be installed on the customer's device. Our system supports various types of devices including smartphone, tablet, desktop PC, and smart glass. To improve the collaboration experience, the system provides a novel gravity-aware hand visualization technique.

In a telepresence scenario with remote users discussing a document, it can be difficult to follow which parts are being discussed. One way to address this is by showing the user's hand position on the document, which also enables expressive gestural communication. An important practical problem is how to capture and transmit the hand movements efficiently with high resolution document images. We propose a tabletop system with two channels that integrates document capture with a 4K video camera and hand tracking with a webcam, in which the document image and hand skeleton data are transmitted at different rates and handled by a lightweight Web browser client at remote sites. To enhance the rendering, we employ velocity based smoothing and ephemeral motion traces. We tested our prototype over long distances from USA to Japan and to Italy, and report on latency and jitter performance. Our system achieves relatively low latency over a long distance in comparison with a tele-immersive system that transmits mesh data over much shorter distances.

A motivating, core capability of most smart, Internet of Things enabled spaces (e.g., home, office, hospital, factory) is the ability to leverage context of use. Location is a key context element; particularly indoor location. Recent advances in radio ranging technologies, such as 802.11-2016 FTM, promise the availability of low-cost, near-ubiquitous time-of-flight-based ranging estimates. In this paper, we build on prior work to enhance the technology's ability to provide useful location estimates. We demonstrate meaningful improvements in coordinate-based estimation accuracy and substantial increases in room-level estimation accuracy. Furthermore, insights gained in our real-world deployment provides important implications for future Internet of Things context applications and their supporting technology deployments such as workflow management, inventory control, or healthcare information tools.

Despite work on smart spaces, nowadays a lot of knowledge work happens in the wild: at home, in coffee places, trains, buses, planes, and of course in crowded open office cubicles. Conducting web conferences in these settings creates privacy issues, and can also distract participants, leading to a perceived lack of professionalism from the remote peer(s). To solve this common problem, we implemented CamaLeon, a browser-based tool that uses real-time machine vision powered by deep learning to change the webcam stream sent by the remote peer: specifically, CamaLeon dynamically changes the "wild" background into one that resembles that of the office workers. In order to detect the background in wild settings, we designed and trained a fast UNet model on head and shoulder images. CamaLeon also uses a face detector to determine whether it should stream the person's face, depending on its location (or lack of presence). It uses face recognition to make sure it streams only a face that belongs to the user who connected to the meeting. The system was tested during a few real video conferencing calls at our company where 2 workers are remote. Both parties felt a sense of enhanced co-presence, and the remote participants felt more professional with their background replaced.

Responding to requests for information from an application, a remote person, or an organization that involve documenting the presence and/or state of physical objects can lead to incomplete or inaccurate documentation. We propose a system that couples information requests with a live object recognition tool to semi-automatically catalog requested items and collect evidence of their current state.

Multimedia research has now moved beyond laboratory experiments and is rapidly being deployed in real-life applications including advertisements, social interaction, search, security, automated driving, and healthcare. Hence, the developed algorithms now have a direct impact on the individuals using the abovementioned services and the society as a whole. While there is a huge potential to benefit the society using such technologies, there is also an urgent need to identify the checks and balances to ensure that the impact of such technologies is ethical and positive. This panel will bring together an array of experts who have experience collecting large-scale datasets, building multimedia algorithms, and deploying them in practical applications, as well as, a lawyer whose eyes have been on the fundamental rights at stake. They will lead a discussion on the ethics and lawfulness of dataset creation, licensing, privacy of individuals represented in the datasets, algorithmic transparency, algorithmic bias, explainability, and the implications of application deployment. Through an interactive process engaging the audience, the panel hopes to: increase the awareness of such concepts in the multimedia research community; initiate a discussion on community guidelines all for setting the future direction of conducting multimedia research in a lawful and ethical manner.

Computational notebooks have become a major medium for data exploration and insight communication in data science. Although expressive, dynamic, and flexible, in practice they are loose collections of scripts, charts, and tables that rarely tell a story or clearly represent the analysis process. This leads to a number of usability issues, particularly in the comprehension and exploration of notebooks. In this work, we design, implement, and evaluate Albireo, a visualization approach to summarize the structure of notebooks, with the goal of supporting more effective exploration and communication by displaying the dependencies and relationships between the cells of a notebook using a dynamic graph structure. We evaluate the system via a case study and expert interviews, with our results indicating that such a visualization is useful for an analyst’s self-reflection during exploratory programming, and also effective for communication of narratives and collaboration between analysts.

Exploring coordinated relationships is important for sensemaking of data in various fields, such as intelligence analysis. To support such investigations, visual analysis tools use biclustering to mine relationships in bipartite graphs and visualize the resulting biclusters with standard graph visualization techniques. Due to overlaps among biclusters, such visualizations can be cluttered (e.g., with many edge crossings), when there are a large number of biclusters. Prior work attempted to resolve this problem by automatically ordering nodes in a bipartite graph. However, visual clutter is still a serious problem, since the number of displayed biclusters remains unchanged. We propose bicluster aggregation as an alternative approach, and have developed two methods of interactively merging biclusters. These interactive bicluster aggregations help organize similar biclusters and reduce the number of displayed biclusters. Initial expert feedback indicates potential usefulness of these techniques in practice.

Think-aloud protocols are widely used by user experience (UX) practitioners in usability testing to uncover issues in user interface design. It is often arduous to analyze large amounts of recorded think-aloud sessions and few UX practitioners have an opportunity to get a second perspective during their analysis due to time and resource constraints. Inspired by the recent research that shows subtle verbalization and speech patterns tend to occur when users encounter usability problems, we take the first step to design and evaluate an intelligent visual analytics tool that leverages such patterns to identify usability problem encounters and present them to UX practitioners to assist their analysis. We first conducted and recorded think-aloud sessions, and then extracted textual and acoustic features from the recordings and trained machine learning (ML) models to detect problem encounters. Next, we iteratively designed and developed a visual analytics tool, VisTA, which enables dynamic investigation of think-aloud sessions with a timeline visualization of ML predictions and input features. We conducted a between-subjects laboratory study to compare three conditions, i.e., VisTA, VisTASimple (no visualization of the ML’s input features), and Baseline (no ML information at all), with 30 UX professionals. The findings show that UX professionals identified more problem encounters when using VisTA than Baseline by leveraging the problem visualization as an overview, anticipations, and anchors as well as the feature visualization as a means to understand what ML considers and omits. Our findings also provide insights into how they treated ML, dealt with (dis)agreement with ML, and reviewed the videos (i.e., play, pause, and rewind).

The analysis of bipartite networks is critical in a variety of application domains, such as exploring entity co-occurrences in intelligence analysis and investigating gene expression in bio-informatics. One important task is missing link prediction, which infers the existence of unseen links based on currently observed ones. In this paper, we propose MissBiN that involves analysts in the loop for making sense of link prediction results. MissBiN combines a novel method for link prediction and an interactive visualization for examining and understanding the algorithm outputs. Further, we conducted quantitative experiments to assess the performance of the proposed link prediction algorithm, and a case study to evaluate the overall effectiveness of MissBiN.

Localization in an indoor and/or Global Positioning System (GPS)-denied environment is paramount to drive various applications that require locating humans and/or robots in an unknown environment. Various localization systems using different ubiquitous sensors such as camera, radio frequency, inertial measurement unit have been developed. Most of these systems cannot accommodate for scenarios which have substan- tial changes in the environment such as a large number of people (unpredictable) and sudden change in the environment floor plan (unstructured). In this paper, we propose a system, InFo that can leverage real-time visual information captured by surveillance cameras and augment that with images captured by the smart device user to deliver accurate discretized location information. Through our experiments, we demonstrate that our deep learning based InFo system provides an improvement of 10% as compared to a system that does not utilize this real-time information.

Automatic medical report generation from chest X-ray images is one possibility for assisting doctors to reduce their workload. However, the different patterns and data distribution of normal and abnormal cases can bias machine learning models. Previous attempts did not focus on isolating the generation of the abnormal and normal sentences in order to increase the variability of generated paragraphs. To address this, we propose to separate abnormal and normal sentence generation by using a dual word LSTM in a hierarchical LSTM model. In addition, we conduct an analysis on the distinctiveness of generated sentences compared to the BLEU score, which increases when less distinct reports are generated. Together with this analysis, we propose a way of selecting a model that generates more distinctive sentences. We hope our findings will help to encourage the development of new metrics to better verify methods of automatic medical report generation.

Human activity forecasting from videos in routine-based tasks is an open research problem that has numerous applications in robotics, visual monitoring and skill assessment. Currently, many challenges exist in activity forecasting because human actions are not fully observable from continuous recording. Additionally, a large number of human activities involve fine-grained articulated human motions that are hard to capture using frame-level representations. To overcome thesechallenges, we propose a method that forecasts human actions by learning the dynamics of local motion patterns extracted from dense trajectories using longshort-term memory (LSTM). The experiments on a pub-lic dataset validated the effectiveness of our proposed method in activity forecasting and demonstrate large improvements over the baseline two stream end-to-endmodel. We also learnt that human activity forecasting benefits from learning both the short-range motion pat-terns and long-term dependencies between actions.

A common issue in training a deep learning, abstractive summarization model is lack of a large set of training summaries. This paper examines techniques for adapting from a labeled source domain to an unlabeled target domain in the context of an encoder-decoder model for text generation. In addition to adversarial domain adaptation (ADA), we introduce the use of artificial titles and sequential training to capture the grammatical style of the unlabeled target domain. Evaluation on adapting to/from news articles and Stack Exchange posts indicates that the use of these techniques can boost performance for both unsupervised adaptation as well as fine-tuning with limited target data.

An open challenge in current telecommunication systems including Skype and other existing research systems is a lack of physical interaction, and consequently a restricted feeling of connection for users. For example, those telecommunication systems cannot allow remote users to move pieces of a board game while playing with a local user. We propose that installing a robot arm and teleoperating it can address the problem by enabling remote physical interaction. We compare three methods for remote control to study the relationship between connection, and how it relates to agency and autonomy for each control scheme.

Manufacturing environments require changes in work procedures and settings based on changes in product demand affecting the types of products for production. Resource re-organization and time needed for worker adaptation to such frequent changes can be expensive. For example, for each change, managers in a factory may be required to manually create a list of inventory items to be picked up by workers. Uncertainty in predicting the appropriate pick-up time due to differences in worker-determined routes may make it difficult for managers to generate a fixed schedule for delivery to the assembly line. To address these problems, we propose OPaPi, a human-centric system that improves the efficiency of manufacturing by optimizing parts pick-up routes and schedules. OPaPi leverages frequent pattern mining and the traveling salesman problem solver to suggest rack placement for more efficient routes. The system further employs interactive visualization to incorporate an expert’s domain knowledge and different manufacturing constraints for real-time adaptive decision making.

As our landscape of wearable technologies proliferates, we find more devices situated on our heads. However, many challenges hinder them from widespread adoption---from their awkward, bulky form factor (today's AR and VR goggles) to their socially stigmatized designs (Google Glass) and a lack of a well-developed head-based interaction design language. In this paper, we explore a socially acceptable, large, head-worn interactive wearable---a hat. We report results from a gesture elicitation study with 17 participants, extract a taxonomy of gestures, and define a set of design concerns for interactive hats. Through this lens, we detail the design and fabrication of three hat prototypes capable of sensing touch, head movements, and gestures, and including ambient displays of several types. Finally, we report an evaluation of our hat prototype and insights to inform the design of future hat technologies.

Millions of images are shared through social media every day. Yet, we know little about how the activities and preferences of users are dependent on the content of these images. In this paper, we seek to understand viewers engagement with photos. We design a quantitative study to expand previous research on in-app visual effects (also known as filters) through the examination of visual content identified through computer vision. This study is based on analysis of 4.9M Flickr images and is organized around three important engagement factors, likes, comments and favorites. We find that filtered photos are not equally engaging across different categories of content. Photos of food and people attract more engagement when filters are used, while photos of natural scenes and photos taken at night are more engaging when left unfiltered. In addition to contributing to the research around social media engagement and photography practices, our findings offer several design implications for mobile photo sharing platforms.

In multi-participant postings, as in online chat conversations, several conversations or topic threads may take place concurrently. This leads to difficulties for readers reviewing the postings in not only following discussions but also in quickly identifying their essence. A two-step process, disentanglement of interleaved posts followed by summarization of each thread, addresses the issue, but disentanglement errors are propagated to the summarization step, degrading the overall performance. To address this, we propose an end-to-end trainable encoder-decoder network for summarizing interleaved posts. The interleaved posts are encoded hierarchically, i.e., word-to-word (words in a post) followed by post-to-post (posts in a channel). The decoder also generates summaries hierarchically, thread-to-thread (generate thread representations) followed by word-to-word (i.e., generate summary words). Additionally, we propose a hierarchical attention mechanism for interleaved text. Overall, our end-to-end trainable hierarchical framework enhances performance over a sequence to sequence framework by 8\% on a synthetic interleaved texts dataset.

Advancements in 360° cameras have increased their related livestreams. In the case of video conferencing, 360° cameras provide almost unrestricted visibility into a conference room for a remote viewer without the need for an articulating camera. However, local participants are left wondering if someone is connected and where remote participants might be looking. To address this, we fabricated a prototype device that shows the gaze and presence of remote 360° viewers using a ring of LEDs that match the remote viewports. We discuss the long term use of one of the prototypes in a lecture hall and present future directions for visualizing gaze presence in 360° video streams.

Livestreaming and video calls have grown in popularity due to the increased connectivity and advancements in mobile devices. Our interactions with these cameras are limited as the cameras are either fixed or manually remote controlled. Here we present a Wizard-of-Oz elicitation study to inform the design of interactions with smart 360\textdegree\ cameras or robotic mobile desk cameras for use in video-conferences and live-streaming situations. There was an overall preference for devices that can minimize distraction as well as preferences for devices that can show they demonstrate an understanding of video-meeting context. We find participants dynamically grow with regards to the complexity of interactions which illustrate the need for deeper event semantics within the Camera AI. Finally, we detail interaction techniques and design insights to inform the next generation of personal video cameras for streaming and collaboration.

Reliable location estimation has been a key enabler of many applications in the UbiComp space. Much progress has been made on the development of accurate of indoor location systems, which form the foundation of many interesting applications, particularly in consumer scenarios. However, many location-based applications in enterprise settings also require addressing another facet of reliability: assurance. Without having strong guarantees of a location estimate’s legitimacy, stakeholders must explicitly balance the advantages offered with the risks of falsification. In this space, there are two key threats: replay attacks, where signal and sensor information is collected in one location and replayed in another to falsify a location estimation later in time; and wormhole attacks, where signal and sensor information is forwarded to a remote location by a colluding device to falsify location estimation in real-time. In this work, we improve upon the state of the art in wormhole-resistant location estimation techniques. Specifically, we present the Location Anchor, which leverages a combination of technical solutions and social contracts to provide high-assurance proofs of device location that are resistant to wormhole attacks. Unlike existing work, the Location Anchor has minimal hardware costs, supports a rich tapestry of applications, and is compatible with commodity smartphone and tablet platforms. We show that the Location Anchor can extend existing replay-resistant location systems into wormhole-resistant location systems, even in the face of very aggressive attacker assumptions. We describe the protocols underlying the Location Anchor, as well as report on the efficacy of a prototype implementation.

We describe a corpus analysis method to extract terminology from a collection of technical specifications book in the field of construction. Using statistics and word n-grams analyzes, we extract the terminology of the domain and then perform pruning steps with linguistic patterns and internet queries to improve the quality of the final terminology. In this paper we specifically focus on the improvements got by applying Internet queries and patterns. These improvements are evaluated by using a manual evaluation carried out by 6 experts in the field in the case of technical specification books.

Work breaks -- both physical and digital -- play an important role in productivity and workplace wellbeing. Yet, the growing availability of digital distractions from online content can turn breaks into prolonged "cyberloafing". In this paper, we present UpTime, a system that aims to support workers' transitions from breaks back to work--moments susceptible to digital distractions. Combining a browser extension and chatbot, users interact with UpTime through proactive and reactive chat prompts. By sensing transitions from inactivity, UpTime helps workers avoid distractions by automatically blocking distracting websites temporarily, while still giving them control to take necessary digital breaks. We report findings from a 3-week comparative field study with 15 workers. Our results show that automatic, temporary blocking at transition points can significantly reduce digital distractions and stress without sacrificing workers' sense of control. Our findings, however, also emphasize that overloading users' existing communication channels for chatbot interaction should be done thoughtfully.

Recent advances on the Internet of Things (IoT) lead to an explosion of physical objects being connected to the Internet. These objects sense, compute, interpret what is occurring within themselves and the world, and preferably interact with users. In this work, we present a visible light-enabled finger tracking technique allowing users to perform freestyle multi-touch gestures on everyday object’s surface. By projecting encoded patterns onto an object’s surface (e.g. paper, display, or table) through a projector, and localizing the user’s fingers with light sensors, the proposed system offers users a richer interactive space than the device’s existing interfaces. More importantly, results from our experiments indicate that this system can localize ten fingers simultaneously with an accuracy of 1.7 millimeters and an refresh rate of 84 Hz with only 31 milliseconds delay on WiFi or 23 milliseconds delay on serial communication, easily supporting multi-finger gesture interaction on everyday ob-jects. We also develop two example applications to demonstrate possible scenarios. Finally, we conduct a pre-liminary exploration of 3D depth inference using the same setup and achieve 2.43 cm depth estimation accuracy.

We present an approach to detect speech impairments from video of people with aphasia, a neurological condition that affects the ability to comprehend and produce speech. To counter inherent privacy issues, we propose a cross-media approach using only visual facial features to detect speech properties without listening to the audio content of speech. Our method uses facial landmark detections to measure facial motion over time. We show how to detect speech and pause instances based on temporal mouth shape analysis and identify repeating mouth patterns using a dynamic warping mechanism. We relate our developed features for pause frequency, mouth pattern repetitions, and pattern variety to actual symptoms of people with aphasia in the AphasiaBank dataset. Our evaluation shows that our developed features are able to reliably differentiate dysfluent speech production of people with aphasia from those without aphasia with an accuracy of 0.86. A combination of these handcrafted features and further statistical measures on talking and repetition improves classification performance to an accuracy of 0.88.

Activity recognition is a core component of many intelligent and context-aware systems. We present a solution for discreetly and unobtrusively recognizing common work activities above a work surface without using cameras.We demonstrate our approach, which utilizes an RF-radar sensor mounted under the work surface, in three domains; recognizing work activities at a convenience-store counter, recognizing common office deskwork activities, and estimating the position of customers in a showroom environment. Our examples illustrate potential benefits for both post-hoc business analytics and for real-time applications. Our solution was able to classify seven clerk activities with 94.9% accuracy using data collected in a lab environment and able to recognize six common deskwork activities collected in real offices with 95.3% accuracy. Using two sensors simultaneously, we demonstrate coarse position estimation around a large surface with 95.4% accuracy. We show that using multiple projections of RF signal leads to improved recognition accuracy. Finally, we show how smartwatches worn by users can be used to attribute an activity, recognized with the RF sensor, to a particular user in multi-user scenarios. We believe our solution can mitigate some of users’ privacy concerns associated with cameras and is useful for a wide range of intelligent systems.

Interaction in Augmented Reality or Mixed Reality environments is generally classified into two modalities: linear (relative to object) or non-linear (relative to camera). Switching between these modes can be arduous in cases where someone's interaction with the device is limited or restricted as is often the case in medical or industrial applications where one's hands might be sterile or soiled. To solve this, we present Sound-to-Experience where the modality can be effectively toggled by a noise or sound which is detected using a modern Artificial Intelligence deep-network classifier.

The analysis of bipartite networks is critical in many application domains, such as studying gene expression in bio-informatics. One important task is missing link prediction, which infers the exis- tence of new links based on currently observed ones. However, in practice, analysts need to utilize their domain knowledge based on the algorithm outputs in order to make sense of the results. We pro- pose a novel visual analysis framework, MissBi, which allows for examining and understanding missing links in bipartite networks. Some initial feedback from a management school professor has demonstrated the effectiveness of the tool.

Projector-camera systems can turn any surface such as tabletops and walls into an interactive display. A basic problem is to recognize the gesture actions on the projected UI widgets. Previous approaches using finger template matching or occlusion patterns have issues with environmental lighting conditions, artifacts and noise in the video images of a projection, and inaccuracies of depth cameras. In this work, we propose a new recognizer that employs a deep neural net with an RGB-D camera; specifically, we use a CNN (Convolutional Neural Network) with optical flow computed from the color and depth channels. We evaluated our method on a new dataset of RGB-D videos of 12 users interacting with buttons projected on a tabletop surface.

Searching collaboratively for places of interest is a common activity that frequently occurs on individual mobile phones, or on large tourist-information displays in public places such as visitor centers or train stations. We created a public display system for collaborative travel planning, as well as a mobile app that can augment the display. We tested them against third-party mobile apps in a simulated travel-search task to understand how the unique features of mobile phones and large displays might be leveraged together to improve collaborative travel planning experience.

We leverage a popularity measure in social media as a distant label for extractive summarization of online conversations. In social media, users can vote, share, or bookmark a post they prefer. The number of these actions is regarded as a measure of popularity. However, popularity is not solely determined by content of a post, e.g., a text or an image in a post, but is highly contaminated by its contexts, e.g., timing, and authority. We propose a disjunctive model, which computes the contribution of content and context separately. For evaluation, we build a dataset where the informativeness of a comment is annotated. We evaluate the results with ranking metrics, and show that our model outperforms the baseline model, which directly uses popularity as a measure of informativeness.

Prewriting is the process of generating and organizing ideas before drafting a document. Although often overlooked by novice writers and writing tool developers, prewriting is a critical process that improves the quality of a final document. To better understand current prewriting practices, we first conducted interviews with writing learners and experts. Based on the learners’ needs and experts’ recommendations, we then designed and developed InkPlanner, a novel pen and touch visualization tool that allows writers to utilize visual diagramming for ideation during prewriting. InkPlanner further allows writers to sort their ideas into a logical and sequential narrative by using a novel widget— NarrativeLine. Using a NarrativeLine, InkPlanner can automatically generate a document outline to guide later drafting exercises. Inkplanner is powered by machine-generated semantic and structural suggestions that are curated from various texts. To qualitatively review the tool and understand how writers use InkPlanner for prewriting, two writing experts were interviewed and a user study was conducted with university students. The results demonstrated that InkPlanner encouraged writers to generate more diverse ideas and also enabled them to think more strategically about how to organize their ideas for later drafting.

With the tremendous progress in sensing and IoT infrastructure, it is foreseeable that IoT systems will soon be available for commercial markets, such as in people's homes. In this paper, we present a deployment study using sensors attached to household objects to capture the resourcefulness of three individuals. The concept of resourcefulness highlights the ability of humans to repurpose objects spontaneously for a different use case than was initially intended. It is a crucial element for human health and wellbeing, which is of great interest for various aspects of HCI and design research. Traditionally, resourcefulness is captured through ethnographic practice. Ethnography can only provide sparse and often short duration observations of human experience, often relying on participants being aware of and remembering behaviours or thoughts they need to report on. Our hypothesis is that resourcefulness can also be captured through continuously monitoring objects being used in everyday life. We developed a system that can record object movement continuously and deployed them in homes of three elderly people for over two weeks. We explored the use of probabilistic topic models to analyze the collected data and identify common patterns.

Despite reflection being identified as a key component of behavior change, most existing tools do not explicitly design for it, carrying an implicit assumption that providing access to self-tracking data is enough to trigger reflection. In this work we design a system for reflection around physical activity. Through a set of workshops, we generated a corpus of 275 reflective questions. We then combine these questions into a set of 25 reflective mini-dialogues. We deliver our mini-dialogues through MMS. 33 active users of fitness trackers used our system in a 2-week field deployment. Results suggest that the mini-dialogues were successful in triggering reflection and that this reflection led to increases in motivation, empowerment, and adoption of new behaviors. Encouragingly, 16 participants elected to use the system for two additional weeks without compensation. We present implications for the design of technology-supported dialog system for reflection.

Continuous monitoring with unobtrusive wearable social sensors is becoming a popular method to assess individual affect states and team effectiveness in human research. A large number of applications have demonstrated the effectiveness of applying wearable sensing in corporate settings; for example, in short periodic social events or in a university campus. However, little is known of how we can automatically detect individual affect and group cohesion for long duration missions. Predicting negative affect states and low cohesiveness is vital for team missions. Knowing team members’ negative states allows timely interventions to enhance their effectiveness. This work investigates whether sensing social interactions and individual behaviors with wearable sensors can provide insights into assessing individual affect states and group cohesion. We analyzed wearable sensor data from a team of six crew members who were deployed on a four-month simulation of a space exploration mission at a remote location. Our work proposes to recognize team members’ affect states and group cohesion as a binary classification problem using novel behavior features that represent dyadic interaction and individual activities. Our method aggregates features from individual members into group levels to predict team cohesion. Our results show that the behavior features extracted from the wearable social sensors provide useful information in assessing personal affect and team cohesion. Group task cohesion can be predicted with a high performance of over 0.8 AUC. Our work demonstrates that we can extract social interactions from sensor data to predict group cohesion in longitudinal missions. We found that quantifying behavior patterns including dyadic interactions and face-to-face communications are important in assessing team process.

Accurate localization is a fundamental requirement for a variety of applications, ranging from industrial robot operations to location-powered applications on mobile devices. A key technical challenge in achieving this goal is providing a clean and reliable estimation of location from a variety of low-cost, uncalibrated sesnors. Many current techniques rely on Particle Filter (PF) based algorithms. They have proven successful at effectively fusing various sensors inputs to create meaningful location predictions. In this paper we build upon this large corpous of work. Like prior work, our technique fuses Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) measurements from Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons with map information. A key contribution of our work is a new sensor model for BLE beacons that does not require the mapping from RSSI to distance. We further contribute a novel method of utilizing map information during the initialization of the system and during the resampling phase when new particles are generated. Using our proposed sensor model and map prior information the performance of the overall localization is improved by 1.20 m on comparing the 75th percentile of the cumulative distribution with traditional localization techniques.

In this paper, we develop a system for the lowcost indoor localization and tracking problem using radio signal strength indicator, Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU), and magnetometer sensors. We develop a novel and simplified probabilistic IMU motion model as the proposal distribution of the sequential Monte-Carlo technique to track the robot trajectory. Our algorithm can globally localize and track a robot with a priori unknown location, given an informative prior map of the Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons. Also, we formulate the problem as an optimization problem that serves as the Backend of the algorithm mentioned above (Front-end). Thus, by simultaneously solving for the robot trajectory and the map of BLE beacons, we recover a continuous and smooth trajectory of the robot, corrected locations of the BLE beacons, and the time varying IMU bias. The evaluations achieved using hardware show that through the proposed closed-loop system the localization performance can be improved; furthermore, the system becomes robust to the error in the map of beacons by feeding back the optimized map to the Front-end.

In this chapter we discuss the use of external sources of data in designing conversational dialogues. We focus on applications in behavior change around physical activity involving dialogues that help users better understand their self-tracking data and motivate healthy behaviors. We start by introducing the areas of behavior change and personal informatics and discussing the importance of self-tracking data in these areas. We then introduce the role of reflective dialogue-based counseling systems in this domain, discuss specific value that self-tracking data can bring, and how it can be used in creating the dialogues. The core of the chapter focuses on six practical examples of design of dialogues involving self-tracking data that we either tested in our research or propose as future directions based on our experiences. We end the chapter by discussing how the design principles for involving external data in conversations can be applied to broader domains. Our goal for this chapter is to share our experiences, outline design principles, highlight several design opportunities in external data-driven computer-based conversations, and encourage the reader to explore creative ways of involving external sources of data in shaping dialogues-based interactions.

We introduce a system to automatically manage photocopies made from copyrighted printed materials. The system monitors photocopiers to detect the copying of pages from copyrighted publications. Such activity is tallied for billing purposes. Access rights to the materials can be checked to prevent printing. Digital images of the copied pages are checked against a database of copyrighted pages. To preserve the privacy of the copying of non-copyright materials, only digital fingerprints are submitted to the image matching service. A problem with such systems is creation of the database of copyright pages. To facilitate this, our system maintains statistics of clusters of similar unknown page images along with copy sequence. Once such a cluster has grown to a sufficient size, a human inspector can determine whether those page sequences are copyrighted. The system has been tested with 100,000s of pages from conference proceedings and with millions of randomly generated pages. Retrieval accuracy has been around 99% even with copies of copies or double-page copies.

Historically, people have interacted with companies and institutions through telephone-based dialogue systems and paper-based forms. Now, these interactions are rapidly moving to web- and phone-based chat systems. While converting traditional telephone dialogues to chat is relatively straightforward, converting forms to conversational interfaces can be challenging. In this work, we introduce methods and interfaces to enable the conversion of PDF and web-based documents that solicit user input into chat-based dialogues. Document data is first extracted to associate fields and their textual descriptions using meta-data and lightweight visual analysis. The field labels, their spatial layout, and associated text are further analyzed to group related fields into natural conversational units. These correspond to questions presented to users in chat interfaces to solicit information needed to complete the original documents and downstream processes they support. This user supplied data can be inserted into the source documents and/or in downstream databases. User studies of our tool show that it streamlines form-to-chat conversion and produces conversational dialogues of at least the same quality as a purely manual approach.

SlideDiff is a system that automatically creates an animated rendering of textual and media differences between two versions of a slide. While previous work focuses either on textual or image data, SlideDiff integrates text and media changes, as well as their interactions, e.g. adding an image forces nearby text boxes to shrink. Provided with two versions of a slide (not the full history of edits), SlideDiff detects the textual and image differences, and then animates the changes by mimicking what a user would have done, such as moving the cursor, typing text, resizing image boxes, adding images. This editing metaphor is well known to most users, helping them better understand what has changed, and fosters a sense of connection between remote workers, making them feel as if we edited together. After detection of text and image differences, the animations are rendered in HTML and CSS, including mouse cursor motion, text and image box selection and resizing, text deletion and insertion with its cursor. We discuss strategies for animating changes, in particular the importance of starting with large changes and finishing with smaller edits, and provide evidence of the utility of SlideDiff in a workplace setting.

Exploring coordinated relationships (e.g., shared relationships between two sets of entities) is an important analytics task in a variety of real-world applications, such as discovering similarly behaved genes in bioinformatics, detecting malware collusions in cyber security, and identifying products bundles in marketing analysis. Coordinated relationships can be formalized as biclusters. In order to support visual exploration of biclusters, bipartite graphs based visualizations have been proposed, and edge bundling is used to show biclusters. However, it suffers from edge crossings due to possible overlaps of biclusters, and lacks in-depth understanding of its impact on user exploring biclusters in bipartite graphs. To address these, we propose a novel bicluster-based seriation technique that can reduce edge crossings in bipartite graphs drawing and conducted a user experiment to study the effect of edge bundling and this proposed technique on visualizing biclusters in bipartite graphs. We found that they both had impact on reducing entity visits for users exploring biclusters, and edge bundles helped them find more justified answers. Moreover, we identified four key trade-offs that inform the design of future bicluster visualizations. The study results suggest that edge bundling is critical for exploring biclusters in bipartite graphs, which helps to reduce low-level perceptual problems and support high-level inferences.

Devices with embedded sensors are permeating the computing landscape, allowing the collection and analysis of rich data about individuals, smart spaces, and their interactions. This class of de- vices enables a useful array of home automation and connected workplace functionality to individuals within instrumented spaces. Unfortunately, the increasing pervasiveness of sensors can lead to perceptions of privacy loss by their occupants. Given that many instrumented spaces exist as platforms outside of a user’s control—e.g., IoT sensors in the home that rely on cloud infrastructure or connected workplaces managed by one’s employer—enforcing access controls via a trusted reference monitor may do little to assuage individuals’ privacy concerns. This calls for novel enforcement mechanisms for controlling access to sensed data. In this paper, we investigate the interplay between sensor fidelity and individual comfort, with the goal of understanding the design space for effective, yet palatable, sensors for the workplace. In the context of a common space contextualization task, we survey and interview individuals about their comfort with three common sensing modalities: video, audio, and passive infrared. This allows us to explore the extent to which discomfort with sensor platforms is a function of detected states or sensed data. Our findings uncover interesting interplays between content, context, fidelity, history, and privacy. This, in turn, leads to design recommendations regarding how to increase comfort with sensing technologies by revisiting the mechanisms by which user preferences and policies are enforced in situations where the infrastructure itself is not trusted.

Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) platforms have scaled online education to unprecedented enrollments, but remain limited by their rigid, predetermined curricula. Increasingly, professionals consume this content to augment or update specific skills rather than complete degree or certification programs. To better address the needs of this emergent user population, we describe a visual recommender system called MOOCex. The system recommends lecture videos {\em across} multiple courses and content platforms to provide a choice of perspectives on topics. The recommendation engine considers both video content and sequential inter-topic relationships mined from course syllabi. Furthermore, it allows for interactive visual exploration of the semantic space of recommendations within a learner's current context.

An enormous amount of conversation occurs online every day, including on chat platforms where multiple conversations may take place concurrently. Interleaved conversations lead to difficulties in not only following discussions but also retrieving relevant information from simultaneous messages. Conversation disentanglement aims to separate overlapping messages into detached conversations. In this paper, we propose to leverage representation learning for conversation disentanglement. A Siamese Hierarchical Convolutional Neural Network (SHCNN), which integrates local and more global representations of a message, is first presented to estimate the conversation-level similarity between closely posted messages. With the estimated similarity scores, our algorithm for Conversation Identification by SImilarity Ranking (CISIR) then derives conversations based on high-confidence message pairs and pairwise redundancy. Experiments were conducted with four publicly available datasets of conversations from Reddit and IRC channels. The experimental results show that our approach significantly outperforms comparative baselines in both pairwise similarity estimation and conversation disentanglement.

Conversational agents stand to play an important role in supporting behavior change and well-being in many domains. With users able to interact with conversational agents through both text and voice, understanding how designing for these channels supports behavior change is important. To begin answering this question, we designed a conversational agent for the workplace that supports workers’ activity journaling and self-learning through reflection. Our agent, named Robota, combines chat-based communication as a Slack Bot and voice interaction through a personal device using a custom Amazon Alexa Skill. Through a 3-week controlled deployment, we examine how voice-based and chat-based interaction affect workers’ reflection and support self-learning. We demonstrate that, while many current technical limitations exist, adding dedicated mobile voice interaction separate from the already busy chat modality may further enable users to step back and reflect on their work. We conclude with discussion of the implications of our findings to design of workplace self-tracking systems specifically and to behavior-change systems in general.

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) have successfully been utilized for localization using a single monocular image [1]. Most of the work to date has either focused on reducing the dimensionality of data for better learning of parameters during training or on developing different variations of CNN models to improve pose estimation. Many of the best performing works solely consider the content in a single image, while the context from historical images is ignored. In this paper, we propose a combined CNN-LSTM which is capable of incorporating contextual information from historical images to better estimate the current pose. Experimental results achieved using a dataset collected in an indoor office space improved the overall system results to 0.8 m & 2.5° at the third quartile of the cumulative distribution as compared with 1.5 m & 3.0° achieved by PoseNet [1]. Furthermore, we demonstrate how the temporal information exploited by the CNN-LSTM model assists in localizing the robot in situations where image content does not have sufficient features.

In this paper, we propose a novel solution to optimize the deployment of (RF) beacons for the purpose of indoor localization. We propose a system that optimizes both the number of beacons and their placement in a given environment. We propose a novel cost-function, called CovBSM, that allows to simultaneously optimize the 3-coverage while maximizing the beacon spreading. Using this cost function, we propose a framework that maximize both the number of beacons and their placement in a given environment. The proposed solution accounts for the indoor infrastructure and its influence on the (RF) signal propagation by embedding a realistic simulator into the optimization process.

Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) platforms have scaled online education to unprecedented enrollments, but remain limited by their rigid, predetermined curricula. This paper presents MOOCex, a technique that can offer a more flexible learning experience for MOOCs. MOOCex can recommend lecture videos across different courses with multiple perspectives, and considers both the video content and also sequential inter-topic relationships mined from course syllabi. MOOCex is also equipped with interactive visualization allowing learners to explore the semantic space of recommendations within their current learning context. The results of comparisons to traditional methods, including content-based recommendation and ranked list representation, indicate the effectiveness of MOOCex. Further, feedback from MOOC learners and instructors suggests that MOOCex enhances both MOOC-based learning and teaching.

Understanding team communication and collaboration patterns is critical for improving work efficiency in organizations. This paper presents an interactive visualization system, T-Cal, that supports the analysis of conversation data from modern team messaging platforms (e.g., Slack). T-Cal employs a user-familiar visual interface, a calendar, to enable seamless multi-scale browsing of data from different perspectives. T-Cal also incorporates a number of analytical techniques for disentangling interleaving conversations, extracting keywords, and estimating sentiment. The design of T-Cal is based on an iterative user-centered design process including field studies, requirements gathering, initial prototypes demonstration, and evaluation with domain users. The resulting two case studies indicate the effectiveness and usefulness of T-Cal in real-world applications, including student group chats during a MOOC and daily conversations within an industry research lab.

This paper describes the development of a multi-sensory clubbing experience which was deployed during two a two-day event within the context of the Amsterdam Dance Event in October 2016 in Amsterdam. We present how the entire experience was developed end-to-end and deployed at the event through the collaboration of several project partners from industries such as art and design, music, food, technology and research. Central to the system are smart textiles, namely wristbands equipped with Bluetooth LE sensors which were used to sense people attending the dance event. We describe the components of the system, the development process, collaboration between the involved entities and the event itself. To conclude the paper, we highlight insights gained from conducting a real world research deployment across many collaborators and stakeholders.

Effective communication of activities and progress in the workplace is crucial for the success of many modern organizations. In this paper, we extend current research on workplace communication and uncover opportunities for technology to support effective work activity reporting. We report on three studies: With a survey of 68 knowledge workers followed by 14 in-depth interviews, we investigated the perceived benefits of different types of progress reports and an array of challenges at three stages: Collection, Composition, and Delivery. We show an important interplay between written and face-to-face reporting, and highlight the importance of tailoring a report to its audience. We then present results from an analysis of 722 reports composed by 361 U.S.-based knowledge workers, looking at the influence of the audience on a report’s language. We conclude by discussing opportunities for future technologies to assist both employees and managers in collecting, interpreting, and reporting progress in the workplace.

Activity recognition is a core component of many intelligent and context-aware systems. In this paper, we present a solution for discreetly and unobtrusively recognizing common work activities above a work surface without using cameras. We demonstrate our approach, which utilizes an RF-radar sensor mounted under the work surface, in two work domains; recognizing work activities at a convenience-store counter (useful for post-hoc analytics) and recognizing common office deskwork activities (useful for real-time applications). We classify seven clerk activities with 94.9% accuracy using data collected in a lab environment, and recognize six common deskwork activities collected in real offices with 95.3% accuracy. We show that using multiple projections of RF signal leads to improved recognition accuracy. Finally, we show how smartwatches worn by users can be used to attribute an activity, recognized with the RF sensor, to a particular user in multi-user scenarios. We believe our solution can mitigate some of users’ privacy concerns associated with cameras and is useful for a wide range of intelligent systems.

This paper examines content-based recommendation in domains exhibiting sequential topical structure. An example is educational video, including Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) in which knowledge builds within and across courses. Conventional content-based or collaborative filtering recommendation methods do not exploit courses' sequential nature. We describe a system for video recommendation that combines topic-based video representation with sequential pattern mining of inter-topic relationships. Unsupervised topic modeling provides a scalable and domain-independent representation. We mine inter-topic relationships from manually constructed syllabi that instructors provide to guide students through their courses. This approach also allows the inclusion of multi-video sequences among the recommendation results. Integrating the resulting sequential information with content-level similarity provides relevant as well as diversified recommendations. Quantitative evaluation indicates that the proposed system, \textit{SeqSense}, recommends fewer redundant videos than baseline methods, and instead emphasizes results consistent with mined topic transitions.

Traditional summarization initiatives have been focused on specific types of documents such as articles, reviews, videos, image feeds, or tweets, a practice which may result in pigeonholing the summarization task in the surrounding of modern, content-rich multimedia collections. Consequently, much of the research to date has revolved around mostly toy problems in narrow domains and working on single-source media types. We argue that summarization and story generation systems need to refocus the problem space in order to meet the information needs in the age of user-generated content in different formats and languages. Here we create a framework for flexible multimedia storytelling. Narratives, stories, and summaries carry a set of challenges in big data and dynamic multi-source media that give rise to new research in spatial-temporal representation, viewpoint generation, and explanation.

Tutorials are one of the most fundamental means of conveying knowledge. Ideally when the task involves physical or digital objects, tutorials not only describe each step with text or via audio narration but show it as well using photos or animation. In most cases, online tutorial authors capture media from handheld mobile devices to compose these documents, but increasingly they use wearable devices as well. In this work, we explore the full life-cycle of online tutorial creation and viewing using head-mounted capture and displays. We developed a media-capture tool for Google Glass that requires minimal attention to the capture device and instead allows the author to focus on creating the tutorial's content rather than its capture. The capture tool is coupled with web-based authoring tools for creating annotatable videos and multimedia documents. In a study comparing standalone (camera on tripod) versus wearable capture (Google Glass) as well as two types of multimedia representation for authoring tutorials (video-based or document-based), we show that tutorial authors have a preference for wearable capture devices, especially when recording activities involving larger objects in non-desktop environments. Authors preferred document-based multimedia tutorials because they are more straightforward to compose and the step-based structure translates more directly to explaining a procedure. In addition, we explored using head-mounted displays (Google Glass) for accessing tutorials in comparison to lightweight computing devices such as tablets. Our study included tutorials recorded with the same capture methods as in our access study. We found that although authors preferred head-mounted capture, tutorial consumers preferred video recorded by a camera on tripod that provides a more stable image of the workspace. Head-mounted displays are good for glanceable information, however video demands more attention and our participants made more errors using Glass than when using a tablet, which was easier to ignore. Our findings point out several design implications for online tutorial authoring and access methods.

Advances in small and low power electronics have created new opportunities for the Internet of Things (IoT), leading to an explosion of physical objects being connected to the Internet. However, there still lacks an indoor localization solution that can answer the needs of various location-based IoT applications with desired simplicity, robustness, accuracy, and responsiveness. We introduce Foglight, a visible light enabled indoor localization system for IoT devices that relies on unique spatial encoding produced when mechanical mirrors inside a projector are flipped based on gray-coded binary images. Foglight employs simple off-the-shelf light sensors that can be easily coupled with existing IoT devices - such as thermometers, gas meters, or light switches - making their location discoverable. Our sensor unit is computation efficient; it can perform high-accuracy localization with minimum signal processing overhead, allowing any low-power IoT device on which it rests to be able to locate itself. Additionally, results from our evaluation reveal that Foglight can locate a target device with an average accuracy of 1.7 millimeters and average refresh rate of 84 Hz with minimal latency, 31.46 milliseconds on WiFi and 23.2 milliseconds on serial communication. Two example applications are developed to demonstrate possible scenarios as proof of concept. We also discuss limitations, how they could be overcome, and propose next steps.

We present a system for capturing ink strokes written with ordinary pen and paper using a fast camera with a frame rate comparable to a stylus digitizer. From the video frames, ink strokes are extracted and used as input to an online handwriting recognition engine. A key component in our system is a pen up/down detection model for detecting the contact of the pen-tip with the paper in the video frames. The proposed model consists of feature representation with convolutional neural networks and classification with a recurrent neural network. We also use a high speed tracker with kernelized correlation filters to track the pen-tip. For training and evaluation, we collected labeled video data of users writing English and Japanese phrases from public datasets, and we report on character accuracy scores for different frame rates in the two languages.

Video telehealth is growing to allow more clinicians to see patients from afar. As a result, clinicians, typically trained for in-person visits, must learn to communicate both health information and non-verbal affective signals to patients through a digital medium. We introduce a system called ReflectLive that senses and provides real-time feedback about non-verbal communication behaviors to clinicians so they can improve their communication behaviors. A user evaluation with 10 clinicians showed that the real-time feedback helped clinicians maintain better eye contact with patients and was not overly distracting. Clinicians reported being more aware of their non-verbal communication behaviors and reacted positively to summaries of their conversational metrics, motivating them to want to improve. Using ReflectLive as a probe, we also discuss the benefits and concerns around automatically quantifying the “soft skills” and complexities of clinician-patient communication, the controllability of behaviors, and the design considerations for how to present real-time and summative feedback to clinicians.

Humans are complex and their behaviors follow complex multimodal patterns, however to solve many social computing problems one often looks at complexity in large-scale yet single point data sources or methodologies. While single data/single method techniques, fueled by large scale data, enjoyed some success, it is not without fault. Often with one type of data and method, all the other aspects of human behavior are overlooked, discarded, or, worse, misrepresented. We identify this as two succinct problems. First, social computing problems that cannot be solved using a single data source and need intelligence from multiple modals and, second, social behavior that cannot be fully understood using only one form of methodology. Throughout this talk, we discuss these problems and their implications, illustrate examples, and propose new directives to properly approach in the social computing research in today’s age.

モバイル技術の発展と日常生活における継続的なつながりは、仕事の進め方に大きく影響を与えている。センシング技術の活用は個人による使用事例が多くを占めているが、ワークプレイスはセンシング技術を活用するのに重要かつ適切な環境である。つまり、従業員が自分の追跡可能な端末を使ってセンシング技術を連携させることが可能である。本稿では、ワークプレイスにおける身体的、精神的、および社会的に良好な状態と生産性を向上させる技術について、2つの最新の調査結果と、行動を変える姿勢を維持 るための仕組みを報告する。次に、新しい作業の領域について簡単に議論する。

Discovering and analyzing biclusters, i.e., two sets of related entities with close relationships, is a critical task in many real-world applications, such as exploring entity co-occurrences in intelligence analysis, and studying gene expression in bio-informatics. While the output of biclustering techniques can offer some initial low-level insights, visual approaches are required on top of that due to the algorithmic output complexity.This paper proposes a visualization technique, called BiDots, that allows analysts to interactively explore biclusters over multiple domains. BiDots overcomes several limitations of existing bicluster visualizations by encoding biclusters in a more compact and cluster-driven manner. A set of handy interactions is incorporated to support flexible analysis of biclustering results. More importantly, BiDots addresses the cases of weighted biclusters, which has been underexploited in the literature. The design of BiDots is grounded by a set of analytical tasks derived from previous work. We demonstrate its usefulness and effectiveness for exploring computed biclusters with an investigative document analysis task, in which suspicious people and activities are identified from a text corpus.

During asynchronous collaborative analysis, handoff of partial findings is challenging because externalizations produced by analysts may not adequately communicate their investigative process. To address this challenge, we developed techniques to automatically capture and help encode tacit aspects of the investigative process based on an analyst’s interactions, and streamline explicit authoring of handoff annotations. We designed our techniques to mediate awareness of analysis coverage, support explicit communication of progress and uncertainty with annotation, and implicit communication through playback of investigation histories. To evaluate our techniques, we developed an interactive visual analysis system, KTGraph, that supports an asynchronous investigative document analysis task. We conducted a two-phase user study to characterize a set of handoff strategies and to compare investigative performance with and without our techniques. The results suggest that our techniques promote the use of more effective handoff strategies, help increase an awareness of prior investigative process and insights, as well as improve final investigative outcomes.

Whether and how does the structure of family trees differ by ancestral traits over generations? This is a fundamental question regarding the structural heterogeneity of family trees for the multi-generational transmission research. However, previous work mostly focuses on parent-child scenarios due to the lack of proper tools to handle the complexity of extending the research to multi-generational processes. Through an iterative design study with social scientists and historians, we develop TreeEvo that assists users to generate and test empirical hypotheses for multi-generational research. TreeEvo summarizes and organizes family trees by structural features in a dynamic manner based on a traditional Sankey diagram. A pixel-based technique is further proposed to compactly encode trees with complex structures in each Sankey Node. Detailed information of trees is accessible through a space-efficient visualization with semantic zooming. Moreover, TreeEvo embeds Multinomial Logit Model (MLM) to examine statistical associations between tree structure and ancestral traits. We demonstrate the effectiveness and usefulness of TreeEvo through an in-depth case-study with domain experts using a real-world dataset (containing 54,128 family trees of 126,196 individuals).

For tourists, interactions with digital public displays often depend on specific technologies that users may not be familiar with (QR codes, NFC, Bluetooth); may not have access to because of networking issues (SMS), may lack a required app (QR codes), or device technology (NFC); may not want to use because of time constraints (WiFi, Bluetooth); or may not want to use because they are worried about sharing their data with a third-party service (text, WiFi). In this demonstration, we introduce ItineraryScanner, a system that allows users to seamlessly share content with a public travel kiosk system.

Video summarization and video captioning are considered two separate tasks in existing studies. For longer videos, automatically identifying the important parts of video content and annotating them with captions will enable a richer and more concise condensation of the video. We propose a general neural network architecture that jointly considers two supervisory signals (i.e., an image-based video summary and text-based video captions) in the training phase and generates both a video summary and corresponding captions for a given video in the test phase. Our main idea is that the summary signals can help a video captioning model learn to focus on important frames. On the other hand, caption signals can help a video summarization model to learn better semantic representations. Jointly modeling both the video summarization and the video captioning tasks offers a novel end-to-end solution that generates a captioned video summary enabling users to index and navigate through the highlights in a video. Moreover, our experiments show the joint model can achieve better performance than state-of- the-art approaches in both individual tasks.

In this paper, we describe DocHandles, a novel system that allows users to link to specific document parts in their chat applications. As users type a message, they can invoke the tool by referring to a specific part of a document, e.g., “@fig1 needs revision”. By combining text parsing and document layout analysis, DocHandles can find and present all the figures “1” inside previously shared documents, allowing users to explicitly link to the relevant “document handle”. Documents become first-class citizens inside the conversation stream where users can seamlessly integrate documents in their text-centric messaging application.

It is increasingly possible to use cameras and sensors to detect and analyze human appearance for the purposes of personalizing user experiences. Such systems are already deployed in some public places to personalize advertisements and recommend items. However, since these technologies are not yet widespread, we do not have a good sense of the perceived benefits and drawbacks of public display systems that use face detection as an input for personalized recommendations. We conducted a user study with a system that inferred a user’s gender and age from a facial detection and analysis algorithm and used this to present recommendations in two scenarios (finding stores to visit in a mall and finding a pair of sunglasses to buy).  This work provides an initial step towards understanding user reactions to a new and emerging form of implicit recommendation based on physical appearance.

The availability of mobile access has shifted social media use. With that phenomenon, what users shared on social media and where they visited is naturally an excellent resource to learn their visiting behavior. Knowing visit behaviors would help market survey and customer relationship management, e.g., sending customers coupons of the businesses that they visit frequently. Most prior studies leverage meta-data e.g., check- in locations to profile visiting behavior but neglect important information from user-contributed content, e.g., images. This work addresses a novel use of image content for predicting the user visit behavior, i.e., the frequent and regular business venue categories that the content owner would visit. To collect training data, we propose a strategy to use geo-metadata associated with images for deriving the labels of an image owner’s visit behavior. Moreover, we model a user’s sequential images by using an end-to-end learning framework to reduce the optimization loss. That helps improve the prediction accuracy against the baseline as demonstrated in our experiments. The prediction is completely based on image content that is more available in social media than geo-metadata, and thus allows coverage in profiling a wider set of users.

Video conferencing is widely used to help deliver educational presentations, such as lectures or informational webinars, to a distributed audience. While individuals in a dyadic conversation may be able to use webcam streams to assess the engagement level of their interlocutor with some ease, as the size of the audience in a video conference setting increases, it becomes increasingly difficult to interpret how engaged the overall group may be. In this work, we use a mixed-methods approach to understand how presenters and attendees of online presentations use available cues to perceive and interpret audience behavior (such as how engaged the group is). Our results suggest that while webcams are seen as useful by presenters to increase audience visibility and encourage attention, audience members do not uniformly benefit from seeing others’ webcams; other interface cues such as chat may be more useful and informative engagement indicators for both parties. We conclude with design recommendations for future systems to improve what is sensed and presented.

In this paper, we propose a real-time classification scheme to cope with noisy Radio Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) measurements utilized in indoor positioning systems. RSSI values are often converted to distances for position estimation. However due to multipathing and shadowing effects, finding a unique sensor model using both parametric and nonparametric methods is highly challenging. We learn decision regions using the Gaussian Processes classification to accept measurements that are consistent with the operating sensor model. The proposed approach can perform online, does not rely on a particular sensor model or parameters, and is robust to sensor failures. The experimental results achieved using hardware show that available positioning algorithms can benefit from incorporating the classifier into their measurement model as a meta-sensor modeling technique.

Observe at a person pointing out and describing something. Where is that person looking? Chances are good that this person also looks at what she is talking about and pointing at. Gaze is naturally coordinated with our speech and hand movements. By utilizing this tendency, we can create a natural interaction with computing devices and environments. In this chapter, we will first briefly discuss some basic properties of the gaze signal we can get from eye trackers, followed by a review of a multimodal system utilizing the gaze signal as one input modality. In Multimodal Gaze Interaction, data from eye trackers is used as an active input mode where for instance gaze is used as an alternative, or complimentary, pointing modality along with other input modalities. Using gaze as an active or explicit input method is challenging for several reasons. One of them being that eyes are primarily used for perceiving our environment, so knowing when a person selects an item with gaze versus just looking around is an issue. Researchers have tried to solve this by combining gaze with various input methods, such as manual pointing, speech, touch, etc. However, gaze information can also be used in interactive systems, for other purposes than explicit pointing since a user's gaze is a good indication of the user's attention. In passive gaze interaction, the gaze is not used as the primary input method, but as a supporting input method. In these kinds of systems, gaze is mainly used for inferring and reasoning about the user's cognitive state or activities in a way that can support the interaction. These kinds of multimodal systems often combine gaze with a multitude of input modalities. In this chapter we focus on interactive systems, exploring the design space for gaze-informed multimodal interaction spanning from gaze as active input mode to passive and if the usage scenario is stationary (at e.g. a desk) or mobile. There are a number of studies aimed at describing, detecting or modeling specific behaviors or cognitive states. We will touch on some of these works since they can guide us in how to build gaze-informed multimodal interaction.

Work breaks can play an important role in the mental and physical well-being of workers and contribute positively to productivity. In this paper we explore the use of activity-, physiological-, and indoor-location sensing to promote mobility during work-breaks. While the popularity of devices and applications to promote physical activity is growing, prior research highlights important constraints when designing for the workplace. With these constraints in mind, we developed BreakSense, a mobile application that uses a Bluetooth beacon infrastructure, a smartphone and a smartwatch to encourage mobility during breaks with a game-like design. We discuss constraints imposed by design for work and the workplace, and highlight challenges associated with the use of noisy sensors and methods to overcome them. We then describe a short deployment of BreakSense within our lab that examined bound vs. unbound augmented breaks and how they affect users’ sense of completion and readiness to work.

Users often use social media to share their interest in products. We propose to identify purchase stages from Twitter data following the AIDA model (Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action). In particular, we define a task of classifying the purchase stage of each tweet in a user's tweet sequence. We introduce RCRNN, a Ranking Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network which computes tweet representations using convolution over word embeddings and models a tweet sequence with gated recurrent units. Also, we consider various methods to cope with the imbalanced label distribution in our data and show that a ranking layer outperforms class weights.

We present Lift, a visible light-enabled finger tracking and object localization technique that allows users to perform freestyle multi-touch gestures on any object’s surface in an everyday environment. By projecting encoded visible patterns onto an object’s surface (e.g. paper, display, or table), and localizing the user’s fingers with light sensors, Lift offers users a richer interactive space than the device’s existing interfaces. Additionally, everyday objects can be augmented by attaching sensor units onto their surface to accept multi-touch gesture input. We also present two applications as a proof of concept. Finally, results from our experiments indicate that Lift can localize ten fingers simultaneously with accuracy of 0.9 mm and 1.8 mm on two axes respectively and an average refresh rate of 84 Hz with 16.7ms delay on WiFi and 12ms delay on serial, making gesture recognition on noninstrumented objects possible.

This is a summary of our participation in the TRECVID 2016 video hyperlinking task (LNK). We submitted four runs in total. A baseline system combined on established vectorspace text indexing and cosine similarity. Our other runs explored the use of distributed word representations in combination with fine-grained inter-segment text similarity measures.

Videos recorded with current mobile devices are increasingly geotagged at fine granularity and used in various location based applications and services. However, raw sensor data collected is often noisy, resulting in subsequent inaccurate geospatial analysis. In this study, we focus on the challenging correction of compass readings and present an automatic approach to reduce these metadata errors. Given the small geo-distance between consecutive video frames, image-based localization does not work due to the high ambiguity in the depth reconstruction of the scene. As an alternative, we collect geographic context from OpenStreetMap and estimate the absolute viewing direction by comparing the image scene to world projections obtained with different external camera parameters. To design a comprehensive model, we further incorporate smooth approximation and feature-based rotation estimation when formulating the error terms. Experimental results show that our proposed pyramid-based method outperforms its competitors and reduces orientation errors by an average of 58.8%. Hence, for downstream applications, improved results can be obtained with these more accurate geo-metadata. To illustrate, we present the performance gain in landmark retrieval and tag suggestion by utilizing the accuracy-enhanced geo-metadata.

Accurate map matching has been a fundamental but challenging problem that has drawn great research attention in recent years. It aims to reduce the uncertainty in a trajectory by matching the GPS points to the road network on a digital map. Most existing work has focused on estimating the likelihood of a candidate path based on the GPS observations, while neglecting to model the probability of a route choice from the perspective of drivers. Here we propose a novel feature-based map matching algorithm that estimates the cost of a candidate path based on both GPS observations and human factors. To take human factors into consideration is very important especially when dealing with low sampling rate data where most of the movement details are lost. Additionally, we simultaneously analyze a subsequence of coherent GPS points by utilizing a new segment-based probabilistic map matching strategy, which is less susceptible to the noisiness of the positioning data. We have evaluated the proposed approach on a public large-scale GPS dataset, which consists of 100 trajectories distributed all over the world. The experimental results show that our method is robust to sparse data with large sampling intervals (e.g., 60 s to 300 s) and challenging track features (e.g., u-turns and loops). Compared with two state-of-the-art map matching algorithms, our method substantially reduces the route mismatch error by 6.4% to 32.3% and obtains the best map matching results in all the different combinations of sampling rates and challenging features.

Improvements in sensor and wireless network enable accurate, automated, instant determination and dissemination of a user's or objects position. The new enabler of location-based services (LBSs) apart from the current ubiquitous networking infrastructure is the enrichment of the different systems with semantics information, such as time, location, individual capability, preference and more. Such semantically enriched system-modeling aims at developing applications with enhanced functionality and advanced reasoning capabilities. These systems are able to deliver more personalized services to users by domain knowledge with advanced reasoning mechanisms, and provide solutions to problems that were otherwise infeasible. This approach also takes user's preference and place property into consideration that can be utilized to achieve a comprehensive range of personalized services, such as advertising, recommendations, or polling. This paper provides an overview of indoor localization technologies, popular models for extracting semantics from location data, approaches for associating semantic information and location data, and applications that may be enabled with location semantics. To make the presentation easy to understand, we will use a museum scenario to explain pros and cons of different technologies and models. More specifically, we will first explore users' needs in a museum scenario. Based on these needs, we will then discuss advantages and disadvantages of using different localization technologies to meet these needs. From these discussions, we can highlight gaps between real application requirements and existing technologies, and point out promising localization research directions. By identifying gaps between various models and real application requirements, we can draw a road map for future location semantics research.

We propose a robust pointing detection with virtual shadow representation for interacting with a public display. Using a depth camera, our shadow is generated by a model with an angled virtual sun light and detects the nearest point as a pointer. Position of the shadow becomes higher when user walks closer, which conveys the notion of correct distance to control the pointer and offers accessibility to the higher area of the display.

The proliferation of workplace multimedia collaboration applications has meant on one hand more opportunities for group work but on the other more data locked away in proprietary interfaces. We are developing new tools to capture and access multimedia content from any source. In this demo, we focus primarily on new methods that allow users to rapidly reconstitute, enhance, and share document-based information.

Adapting to personal needs and supporting correct posture are important in physiotherapy training. In this demo, we show a dual screen application (handheld and TV) that allows patients to view hypervideo training programs. Designed to guide their daily exercises, these programs can be adapted to daily needs. The dual screen concept offers the positional flexibility missing in single screen solutions.

Dual screen concepts for hypervideo-based physiotherapy training are important in healthcare settings, but existing applications often cannot be adapted to personal needs and do not support correct posture. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of a dual screen application (handheld and TV) that allows patients to view hypervideos designed to help them correctly perform their exercises. This approach lets patients adapt their training to their daily needs and their overall training progress. We evaluated this prototypical implementation in a user test with post-operative care prostate cancer patients. From our results, we derived design recommendations for dual screen physical training hypervideo applications.

Different systems exist for the creation of hypervideos nowadays. However, the creation of the video scenes which are put together to a hypervideo is a tedious and time consuming job. Then again huge video databases like YouTube exist which already provide rich sources of video materials. Yet it is not allowed to download and re-purpose the videos from there legally, which requires a solution to link whole videos or parts of videos and play them from the platform in an embedded player. This work presents the SIVA Web Producer, a Chrome extension for the creation of hypervideos consisting of scenes from YouTube videos. After creating a project, the Chrome extension allows to import YouTube videos or parts thereof as video clips. These can than be linked to a scene graph. A preview is provided and finalized videos can be published on the SIVA Web Portal.

In this paper we describe DocuGram, a novel tool to capture and share documents from any application. As users scroll through pages of their document inside the native application (Word, Google Docs, web browser), the system captures and analyses in real-time the video frames and reconstitutes the original document pages into an easy to view HTML-based representation. In addition to regenerating the document pages, a DocuGram also includes the interactions users had over them, e.g. mouse motions and voice comments. A DocuGram acts as a modern copy machine, allowing users to copy and share any document from any application.

Most teleconferencing tools treat users in distributed meetings monolithically: all participants are meant to be connected to one another in the more-or-less the same manner. In reality, though, people connect to meetings in all manner of different contexts, sometimes sitting in front of a laptop or tablet giving their full attention, but at other times mobile and involved in other tasks or as a liminal participant in a larger group meeting. In this paper we present the design and evaluation of two applications, Penny and MeetingMate, designed to help users in non-standard contexts participate in meetings.

The abundance of data posted to Twitter enables companies to extract useful information, such as Twitter users who are dissatisfied with a product. We endeavor to determine which Twitter users are potential customers for companies and would be receptive to product recommendations through the language they use in tweets after mentioning a product of interest. With Twitter's API, we collected tweets from users who tweeted about mobile devices or cameras. An expert annotator determined whether each tweet was relevant to customer purchase behavior and whether a user, based on their tweets, eventually bought the product. For the relevance task, among four models, a feed-forward neural network yielded the best cross-validation accuracy of over 80% per product. For customer purchase prediction of a product, we observed improved performance with the use of sequential input of tweets to recurrent models, with an LSTM model being best; we also observed the use of relevance predictions in our model to be more effective with less powerful RNNs and on more difficult tasks.

Two related challenges with current teleoperated robotic systems are lack of peripheral vision and awareness, and difficulty or tedium of navigating through remote spaces. We address these challenges by providing an interface with a focus plus context (F+C) view of the robot location, and where the user can navigate simply by looking where they want to go, and clicking or drawing a path on the view to indicate the desired trajectory or destination. The F+C view provides an undistorted, perspectively correct central region surrounded by a wide field of view peripheral portion, and avoids the need for separate views. The navigation method is direct and intuitive in comparison to keyboard or joystick based navigation, which require the user to be in a control loop as the robot moves. Both the F+C views and the direct click navigation were evaluated in a preliminary user study.

Mobile Telepresence Robots (MTR) are an emerging technology that extend the functionality of telepresence systems by adding mobility. MTRs nowadays, however, rely on stationary imaging systems such as a single narrow-view camera for vision, which can lead to reduced operator performance due to view-related deficiencies in situational awareness. We therefore developed an improved imaging and viewing platform that allows immersive telepresence using a Head Mounted Device (HMD) with head-tracked mono and stereoscopic video. Using a remote collaboration task to ground our research, we examine the effectiveness head-tracked HMD systems in comparison to a baseline monitor-based system. We performed a user study where participants were divided into three groups: fixed camera monitor-based baseline condition (without HMD), HMD with head-tracked 2D camera and HMD with head-tracked stereo camera. Results showed the use of HMD reduces task error rates and improves perceived collaborative success and quality of view, compared to the baseline condition. No major difference was found, however, between stereo and 2D camera conditions for participants wearing an HMD.

Social media offers potential opportunities for businesses to extract business intelligence. This paper presents Tweetviz, an interactive tool to help businesses extract actionable information from a large set of noisy Twitter messages. Tweetviz visualizes tweet sentiment of business locations, identifies other business venues that Twitter users visit, and estimates some simple demographics of the Twitter users frequenting a business. A user study to evaluate the system's ability indicates that Tweetviz can provide an overview of a business's issues and sentiment as well as information aiding users in creating customer profiles.