tocauthor: McCann_J* : Human-Computer Interaction Bibliography Search

RapID: A Framework for Fabricating Low-Latency Interactive Objects with RFID Tags IoT and HCI ASAP! / Spielberg, Andrew / Sample, Alanson / Hudson, Scott E. / Mankoff, Jennifer / McCann, James Proceedings of the ACM CHI'16 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2016-05-07 v.1 p.5897-5908

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Summary: RFID tags can be used to add inexpensive, wireless, batteryless sensing to objects. However, quickly and accurately estimating the state of an RFID tag is difficult. In this work, we show how to achieve low-latency manipulation and movement sensing with off-the-shelf RFID tags and readers. Our approach couples a probabilistic filtering layer with a monte-carlo-sampling-based interaction layer, preserving uncertainty in tag reads until they can be resolved in the context of interactions. This allows designers' code to reason about inputs at a high level. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach with a number of interactive objects, along with a library of components that can be combined to make new designs.

Threadsteading: Playful Interaction for Textile Fabrication Devices Interactivity / Albaugh, Lea / Grow, April / Liu, Chenxi / McCann, James / Smith, Gillian / Mankoff, Jennifer Extended Abstracts of the ACM CHI'16 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2016-05-07 v.2 p.285-288

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Summary: Our interaction -- Threadsteading -- combines game design practices, traditional crafting techniques of quilting and embroidery, and existing fabrication technologies to produce an innovative game experience that results in a tangible artifact at the end of play. Threadsteading offers a glimpse at a future in which humans can engage in realtime, playful interaction with fabrication machines.

Joint 5D Pen Input for Light Field Displays Session 9B: Pens, Mice and Sensor Strips / Tompkin, James / Muff, Samuel / McCann, James / Pfister, Hanspeter / Kautz, Jan / Alexa, Marc / Matusik, Wojciech Proceedings of the 2015 ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology 2015-11-05 v.1 p.637-647

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Summary: Light field displays allow viewers to see view-dependent 3D content as if looking through a window; however, existing work on light field display interaction is limited. Yet, they have the potential to parallel 2D pen and touch screen systems, which present a joint input and display surface for natural interaction. We propose a 4D display and interaction space using a dual-purpose lenslet array, which combines light field display and light field pen sensing, and allows us to estimate the 3D position and 2D orientation of the pen. This method is simple, fast (150Hz), with position accuracy of 2-3mm and precision of 0.2-0.6mm from 0-350mm away from the lenslet array, and orientation accuracy of 2 degrees and precision of 0.2-0.3 degrees within a 45 degree field of view. Further, we 3D print the lenslet array with embedded baffles to reduce out-of-bounds cross-talk, and use an optical relay to allow interaction behind the focal plane. We demonstrate our joint display/sensing system with interactive light field painting.

Gauging Correct Relative Rankings For Similarity Search Short Papers: Information Retrieval / Yu, Weiren / McCann, Julie Proceedings of the 2015 ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management 2015-10-19 p.1791-1794

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Summary: One of the important tasks in link analysis is to quantify the similarity between two objects based on hyperlink structure. SimRank is an attractive similarity measure of this type. Existing work mainly focuses on absolute SimRank scores, and often harnesses an iterative paradigm to compute them. While these iterative scores converge to exact ones with the increasing number of iterations, it is still notoriously difficult to determine how well the relative orders of these iterative scores can be preserved for a given iteration. In this paper, we propose efficient ranking criteria that can secure correct relative orders of node-pairs with respect to SimRank scores when they are computed in an iterative fashion. Moreover, we show the superiority of our criteria in harvesting top-K SimRank scores and bucket orders from a full ranking list. Finally, viable empirical studies verify the usefulness of our techniques for SimRank top-K ranking and bucket ordering.

High Quality Graph-Based Similarity Search Session 1C: Efficient Algorithms / Yu, Weiren / McCann, Julie Ann Proceedings of the 2015 Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval 2015-08-09 p.83-92

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Summary: SimRank is an influential link-based similarity measure that has been used in many fields of Web search and sociometry. The best-of-breed method by Kusumoto et. al., however, does not always deliver high-quality results, since it fails to accurately obtain its diagonal correction matrix D. Besides, SimRank is also limited by an unwanted "connectivity trait": increasing the number of paths between nodes a and b often incurs a decrease in score s(a,b). The best-known solution, SimRank++, cannot resolve this problem, since a revised score will be zero if a and b have no common in-neighbors. In this paper, we consider high-quality similarity search. Our scheme, SR#, is efficient and semantically meaningful: (1) We first formulate the exact D, and devise a "varied-D" method to accurately compute SimRank in linear memory. Moreover, by grouping computation, we also reduce the time of from quadratic to linear in the number of iterations. (2) We design a "kernel-based" model to improve the quality of SimRank, and circumvent the "connectivity trait" issue. (3) We give mathematical insights to the semantic difference between SimRank and its variant, and correct an argument: "if D is replaced by a scaled identity matrix, top-K rankings will not be affected much". The experiments confirm that SR# can accurately extract high-quality scores, and is much faster than the state-of-the-art competitors.

A Layered Fabric 3D Printer for Soft Interactive Objects Design and 3D Object Fabrication / Peng, Huaishu / Mankoff, Jennifer / Hudson, Scott E. / McCann, James Proceedings of the ACM CHI'15 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2015-04-18 v.1 p.1789-1798

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Summary: We present a new type of 3D printer that can form precise, but soft and deformable 3D objects from layers of off-the-shelf fabric. Our printer employs an approach where a sheet of fabric forms each layer of a 3D object. The printer cuts this sheet along the 2D contour of the layer using a laser cutter and then bonds it to previously printed layers using a heat sensitive adhesive. Surrounding fabric in each layer is temporarily retained to provide a removable support structure for layers printed above it. This process is repeated to build up a 3D object layer by layer. Our printer is capable of automatically feeding two separate fabric types into a single print. This allows specially cut layers of conductive fabric to be embedded in our soft prints. Using this capability we demonstrate 3D models with touch sensing capability built into a soft print in one complete printing process, and a simple LED display making use of a conductive fabric coil for wireless power reception.

Sig-SR: SimRank search over singular graphs Poster session (short papers) / Yu, Weiren / McCann, Julie A. Proceedings of the 2014 Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval 2014-07-06 p.859-862

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Summary: SimRank is an attractive structural-context measure of similarity between two objects in a graph. It recursively follows the intuition that "two objects are similar if they are referenced by similar objects". The best known matrix-based method [1] for calculating SimRank, however, implies an assumption that the graph is non-singular, its adjacency matrix is invertible. In reality, non-singular graphs are very rare; such an assumption in [1] is too restrictive in practice. In this paper, we provide a treatment of [1], by supporting similarity assessment on non-invertible adjacency matrices. Assume that a singular graph G has n nodes, with r(2+Kr2)) time for K iterations. In contrast, the only known matrix-based algorithm that supports singular graphs [1] needs O(r4n2) time. The experimental results on real and synthetic datasets demonstrate the superiority of InvSR on singular graphs against its baselines.

SenCity: uncovering the hidden pulse of a city (workshop) Workshop: uncovering the hidden pulse of a city / Gallacher, Sarah / Kalnikaite, Vaiva / McCann, Julie / Prendergast, David / Bird, Jon / Jetter, Hans-Christian Adjunct Proceedings of the 2013 International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing 2013-09-08 v.2 p.1311-1316

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Summary: Cities act as hubs designed to accommodate and support millions of inhabitants, nomads and tourists that rely on the city's infrastructure to move around, communicate and flourish as individuals and as a community. This shapes the culture, habits and pulse of a city creating an organic urban landscape often invisible to the naked eye, but traceable digitally. With the proliferation of sensing and pervasive technologies, we should be able to tell the levels of crowdedness of the city, its mood, or how clean it is by sensing and visualising these aspects. However, this poses interesting research and design questions; how would one design a device for tracking and visualising crowdedness on buses, for example. This workshop aims to explore the use of sensing technologies for visually resurfacing some of the hidden dynamics of the city by providing a collaborative and facilitated environment for applied research and creative exploration. This complements other workshops in the "urban" or "cities" theme, such as PURBA (Pervasive Urban Applications), that investigate urban environments from a theoretical perspective. After initial discussions on a joint workshop, the SenCity and PURBA organisers concluded that these workshops were complementary yet different enough to give participants the benefit of taking part in both; gaining the theory from PURBA and collaboratively applying practical research and creative flair at the SenCity workshop to sense, visualise and share the hidden pulse of Zürich.

Intel Collaborative Research Institute -- Sustainable Connected Cities Landscape Papers / Schöning, Johannes / Rogers, Yvonne / Bird, Jon / Capra, Licia / McCann, Julie A. / Prendergast, David / Sheridan, Charles Proceedings of the 2012 International Joint Conference on Ambient Intelligence 2012-11-13 p.364-372

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Summary: Cities are places where people, meet, exchange, work, live and interact. They bring people with different interests, experiences and knowledge close together. They are the centres of culture, economic development and social change. They offer many opportunities to innovate with technologies, from the infrastructures that underlie the sewers to computing in the cloud. One of the overarching goals of Intel's Collaborative Research Institute on Sustainable Connected Cities is to integrate the technological, economic and social needs of cities in ways that are sustainable and human-centred. Our objective is to inform, develop and evaluate services that enhance the quality of living in the city.

Mid-level smoke control for 2D animation Animation / Barnat, Alfred / Li, Zeyang / McCann, James / Pollard, Nancy S. Proceedings of the 2011 Conference on Graphics Interface 2011-05-25 p.25-32

Summary: In this paper we introduce the notion that artists should be able to control fluid simulations by providing examples of expected local fluid behavior (for instance, an artist might specify that magical smoke often forms star shapes). As our idea fits between high-level, global pose control and low-level parameter adjustment, we deem it mid-level control. We make our notion concrete by demonstrating two mid-level controllers providing stylized smoke effects for two-dimensional animations. With these two controllers, we allow the artist to specify both density patterns, or particle motifs, which should emerge frequently within the fluid and global texture motifs to which the fluid should conform. Each controller is responsible for constructing a stylized version of the current fluid state, which we feed-back into a global pose control method. This feedback mechanism allows the smoke to retain fluid-like behavior, while also attaining a stylized appearance suitable to integration with 2D animations. We integrate these mid-level controls with an interactive animation system, in which the user can control and keyframe all animation parameters using an interactive timeline view.

ajME: making game engines autonomic / Martins, Pedro / McCann, Julie A. Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference Fun and Games 2010-09-15 p.48-57

Keywords: autonomic computing, game engine, self-adaptive, self-healing systems, software engineering

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Summary: Autonomic Computing is now showing its value as a solution to the increased complexities of maintaining computer systems and has been applied to many different fields. In this paper, we demonstrate how a gaming application can benefit from autonomic principles. Currently, minimal adaptivity has been used in games and is typically manifested as bespoke mechanisms that cannot be shared, extended, reused etc. In this paper we show the advantages of Autonomic Computing in terms of not only improved performance, but also show that decoupling adaptivity mechanisms from the managed game can be done efficiently whilst improving its software engineering.
To this end we implement and evaluate a proof of concept architecture using the popular Java game engine jMonkeyEngine and in doing so produce autonomic extensions for the jMonkeyEngine (namely ajME). We show that this framework enables easy adoption of autonomic computing in games created using this games engine but also how this relates to other engines. We conclude that autonomic computing in gaming is viable (i.e. performance is improved while leaving the game quality minimally changed), has advantages over other approaches from a software engineering point of view and all with a minimal overhead. We then discuss the difficulties that are still present in the implementation of autonomic gaming systems, and suggest some further work that could be done in order to improve this area.

Network stack diagnosis and visualization tool / Wongsuphasawat, Krist / Artornsombudh, Pornpat / Nguyen, Bao / McCann, Justin Proceedings of the 2009 Symposium on Computer Human Interaction for the Management of Information Technology 2009-11-07 p.4

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Summary: End users are often frustrated by unexpected problems while using networked software, leading to frustrated calls to the help desk seeking solutions. However, trying to locate the cause of these unexpected behaviors is not a simple task. The key to many network monitoring and diagnosis approaches is using cross-layer information, but the complex interaction between network layers and usually large amount of collected data prevent IT support personnel from determining the root of errors and bottlenecks. There is a need for the tools that reduce the amount of data to be processed, offer a systematic exploration of the data, and assist whole-stack performance analysis.
In this paper, we present Visty, a network stack visualization tool that allows IT support personnel to systematically explore network activities at end hosts. Visty can provide an overview picture of the network stack at any specified time, showing how errors in one layer affect the performance of others. Visty was designed as a prototype for more advanced diagnosis tools, and also may be used to assist novice users in understanding the network stack and relationships between each layer.

Parallel Computing for Term Selection in Routing/Filtering Posters / MacFarlane, Andy / Robertson, Stephen E. / McCann, Julie A. Proceedings of ECIR'03, the 2003 European Conference on Information Retrieval 2003-04-14 p.537-545

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Summary: It has been postulated that a method of selecting terms in either routing or filtering using relevance feedback would be to evaluate every possible combination of terms in a training set and determine which combination yields the best retrieval results. Whilst this is not a realistic proposition because of the enormous size of the search space, some heuristics have been developed on the Okapi system to tackle the problem which are computationally intensive. This paper describes parallel computing techniques that have been applied to these heuristics to reduce the time it takes to select to select terms.