Towards successful user interaction with systems: Focusing on user-derived gestures for smart home systems

Various studies that derived gesture commands from users have used the frequency ratio to select popular gestures among the users. However, the users select only one gesture from a limited number of gestures that they could imagine during an experiment, and thus, the selected gesture may not always be the best gesture. Therefore, two experiments including the same participants were conducted to identify whether the participants maintain their own gestures after observing other gestures. As a result, 66% of the top gestures were different between the two experiments. Thus, to verify the changed gestures between the two experiments, a third experiment including another set of participants was conducted, which showed that the selected gestures were similar to those from the second experiment. This finding implies that the method of using the frequency in the first step does not necessarily guarantee the popularity of the gestures.     

Affective wearables

An affective wearable is a wearable system equipped with sensors and tools which enables recognition of its wearer's affective patterns. Affective patterns include expressions of emotion such as a joyful smile, an angry gesture, a strained voice or a change in autonomic nervous system activity such as accelerated heart rate or increasing skin conductivity. This paper describes new applications of affective wearables, and presents a prototype which gathers physiological signals and their annotations from its wearer. Results of preliminary experiments of its performance are reported for a user wearing four different sensors and engaging in several natural activities.     

Monitoring user activities in smart home environments

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) enable smart environments to create pervasive and ubiquitous applications, which give context-aware and scalable services to the end users. In this paper, we propose an architecture and design of a web application for a sensor network monitoring. Further, the variation in received signal strength indicator values is used for knowledge extraction. Experiments are conducted in an in-door room environment to determine the activities of a person. For instance, a WSN consisting of Moteiv’s Tmote Sky sensors is deployed in a bedroom to determine the sleeping behavior and other activities of a person.     

Automatic and personalized recommendation of TV program contents using sequential pattern mining for smart TV user interaction

Due to the excessive number of TV program contents available at user’s side, efficient access to the preferred TV program content becomes a critical issue for smart TV user interaction. In this paper, we propose an automatic recommendation scheme of TV program contents in sequence using sequential pattern mining (SPM). Motivation of sequential TV program recommendation is based on TV viewer’s behaviors for watching multiple TV program contents in a row. A sequence of TV program contents for recommendation to a target user is constructed based on the features such as an occurrence and net occurrence of frequently watched TV program contents from the similar user group to which the target user belongs. Three types of SPM methods are presented—offline, online and hybrid SPM. To extract sequential patterns of preferably watched TV program contents, we propose a preference weighted normalized modified retrieval rank (PW-NMRR) metric for similar user clustering. In the offline SPM method, we effectively construct the sequential patterns for recommendation using a projection method, which yields good performance for relatively longer sequential patterns. The online SPM method mines sequential patterns online by effectively reflecting the recent preference characteristics of users for TV program contents, which is effective for short-sequence recommendation. The hybrid SPM method combines the offline and online SPM methods. The maximum precisions of 0.877, 0.793 and 0.619 for length-1, -2 and -3 sequence recommendations are obtained from the online, hybrid and offline SPM methods, respectively.     

基于本体的智能空间用户活动识别方法

为提高智能空间中用户活动识别的准确率,提出一种基于本体的活动识别方法.通过分析智能家居中的上下文语义及实体间的关联,建立了明确的活动领域本体,结合上下文知识和用户模型,定义相关用户活动状态,进而采用语义推理实现了用户活动的识别.实验验证了该方法的有效性和可扩展性,并将识别的时间效率与HMM识别法进行了比较,表明了该方法的识别时间低于HMM识别法.     

增强的基于智能卡的远程用户认证协议

基于智能卡的远程用户认证协议比基于口令的安全协议能提供更好的安全性。2011年Chen等提出一种对Hsiang-Shih方案改进的基于智能卡的远程认证协议,并称解决了相关方案中存在的各种攻击问题。指出Chen等方案仍然存在着内部攻击、丢失智能卡攻击、重放攻击和身份冒充攻击,并针对基于口令和智能卡的远程认证协议类存在的离线口令猜测攻击提出一种基于智能卡和椭圆曲线离散对数问题的认证协议。该协议能抵抗提到的所有攻击,在登陆和认证阶段只需要一个点乘运算。     

Personalizing user–agent interaction

Interface agents are computer programs that provide personalized assistance to users with their computer-based tasks. The interface agents developed so far have focused their attention on learning a user's preferences in a given application domain and on assisting him according to them. However, in order to personalize the interaction with users, interface agents should also learn how to best interact with each user and how to provide them assistance of the right sort at the right time. To fulfil this goal, an interface agent has to discover when the user wants a suggestion to solve a problem or deal with a given situation, when he requires only a warning about it and when he does not need any assistance at all. In this work, we propose a learning algorithm, named WoS, to tackle this problem. Our algorithm is based on the observation of a user's actions and on a user's reactions to the agent's assistance actions. The WoS algorithm enables an interface agent to adapt its behavior and its interaction with a user to the user's assistance requirements in each particular context.     

Two robust remote user authentication protocols using smart cards

With the rapid growth of electronic commerce and enormous demand from variants of Internet based applications, strong privacy protection and robust system security have become essential requirements for an authentication scheme or universal access control mechanism. In order to reduce implementation complexity and achieve computation efficiency, design issues for efficient and secure password based remote user authentication scheme have been extensively investigated by research community in these two decades. Recently, two well-designed password based authentication schemes using smart cards are introduced by Hsiang and Shih (2009) and Wang et al. (2009), respectively. Hsiang et al. proposed a static ID based authentication protocol and Wang et al. presented a dynamic ID based authentication scheme. The authors of both schemes claimed that their protocol delivers important security features and system functionalities, such as mutual authentication, data security, no verification table implementation, freedom on password selection, resistance against ID-theft attack, replay attack and insider attack, as well as computation efficiency. However, these two schemes still have much space for security enhancement. In this paper, we first demonstrate a series of vulnerabilities on these two schemes. Then, two enhanced protocols with corresponding remedies are proposed to eliminate all identified security flaws in both schemes.     

A remote user authentication scheme without using smart cards

User authentication is one of the fundamental procedures to ensure secure communications over an insecure public network channel. Especially, due to tamper-resistance and convenience in managing a password file, various user authentication schemes using smart cards have been proposed. A smart card however far from ubiquitous because of the high cost of a smart card and the infrastructure requirements. In this paper, we study secure user authentication using only a common storage device such as a universal serial bus (USB) memory, instead of using smart cards. We first show that the existing schemes using smart cards cannot be immediately converted into schemes using a common storage device. We then propose a practical and secure user authentication scheme, capable of supporting the use of the common storage device, which retains all the advantages of schemes using smart cards.     

On accepting smart environments at user and societal levels

This paper studies beliefs which predict acceptance of smart environments at the user level and the preconditions for acceptance at the societal level. The authors use a thorough literature survey and eight in-depth expert interviews based on four scenarios (home, conference, mall, and gym). As the results indicate, the crucial beliefs for acceptance turn out to be usefulness, ease of use, trust, and social influence at the user level. At the societal level, the preconditions are cultural, economic, and legal. The in-depth interviews confirm some of the results previously reported in the literature including the importance of usefulness, ease of use, and trust for user acceptance. In addition to previous results, social influence as a belief is considered. The external variables affecting beliefs are divided into two categories, namely individual differences and circumstantial differences. Individual differences include variables (age, socio-economic status, experience) already known in the literature, also considering health. Circumstantial differences include audience and place. Place can be public, semi-public, or private and considered from the viewpoints of location (size, pathways) and degree of familiarity. Audience was considered from the amount and role of people at presence (alone, with friends, with strangers). To the authors’ knowledge, these circumstantial differences have not been discussed in the user acceptance literature before.     

基于智能卡的动态身份认证协议

认证协议是确保服务器和用户通过公开网络进行安全通信的一个重要手段。针对2013年皮兰等提出的一种改进的基于智能卡的远程异步认证协议,指出皮兰等方案缺乏匿名性且对拒绝服务(Do S)攻击是脆弱的,并给出一种新的认证方案。新方案采用动态登录身份保护用户的匿名性和三次握手技术抵抗D o S攻击,通过安全性证明和性能分析说明了新协议的高效性。     

Enhanced interaction styles for user interfaces

Seven precompetitive research projects on user interfaces in Europe are described. The projects considered are Hufit, the Comett I Project, the Elusive Office Project, the Euroworkstation Project, Acord, MMI², and Xtra. The integration of user interface technologies into new application tasks and the integration of new techniques and artifacts into toolkits are stressed. Also addressed are spreading human factors awareness, adding intelligence to the integration, and the interaction of graphics and natural languages     

一种改进的智能卡远程用户匿名认证方案

针对Sonwanshi提出的远程用户认证方案存在会话密钥安全性差、不能抵御扮演攻击和离线口令猜测攻击的缺陷,提出了一种改进方案,主要在注册和登录阶段增加了安全性能。在注册阶段,用户口令直接在智能卡内进行相应运算,不再提交给服务器。这不仅降低了服务器对口令存储、维护的开销,而且避免了服务器对用户的攻击,提高了安全性能。在登录阶段,采用随机数的挑战应答方式取代原方案的时间戳方式,消除了时钟不同步导致的认证失败。对原方案、改进方案和其他同类方案进行安全性和效率分析的结果表明,改进方案不仅弥补了原方案的缺陷,而且相对同类方案,降低了时间复杂度,适用于安全需求高、处理能力低的设备。     

An enhanced smart card based remote user password authentication scheme

Smart card based password authentication is one of the simplest and efficient authentication mechanisms to ensure secure communication in insecure network environments. Recently, Chen et al. have pointed out the weaknesses of some password authentication schemes and proposed a robust smart card based remote user password authentication scheme to improve the security. As per their claims, their scheme is efficient and can ensure forward secrecy of the session key. However, we find that Chen et al.'s scheme cannot really ensure forward secrecy, and it cannot detect the wrong password in login phase. Besides, the password change phase of Chen et al.'s scheme is unfriendly and inefficient since the user has to communicate with the server to update his/her password. In this paper, we propose a modified smart card based remote user password authentication scheme to overcome the aforementioned weaknesses. The analysis shows that our proposed scheme is user friendly and more secure than other related schemes.     

An efficient biometrics-based remote user authentication scheme using smart cards

In this paper, we propose an efficient biometric-based remote user authentication scheme using smart cards, in which the computation cost is relatively low compared with other related schemes. The security of the proposed scheme is based on the one-way hash function, biometrics verification and smart card. Moreover, the proposed scheme enables the user to change their passwords freely and provides mutual authentication between the users and the remote server. In addition, many remote authentication schemes use timestamps to resist replay attacks. Therefore, synchronized clock is required between the user and the remote server. In our scheme, it does not require synchronized clocks between two entities because we use random numbers in place of timestamps.     

An integrated framework of user experience-oriented smart service requirement analysis for smart product service system development

The rapid deployment of digital technologies drives the conventional product service system (PSS) to shift into a new paradigm known as smart PSS. Empowered with smart capabilities, smart PSS has great potential in creating positive user experience (UX). The requirements analysis is an essential task for successful development of smart PSS with strong UX. Nevertheless, there is still a lack of research on the requirement analysis of smart PSS by incorporating smart-enabled UX perspective. Hence, this paper proposes a framework of user experience-oriented smart service requirement (UXO-SSR) analysis for smart PSS development. At first, the relevant factors (e.g., user personas and activity journey) are integrated to conceptualize the UX in smart PSS context. Second, a four-phase model is proposed for identifying UXO-SSR, which can provide an effective tool for acquiring UX requirements of smart PSS from holistic perspective. Third, a novel asymmetric trapezium cloud-based uncertain linguistic BWM approach is developed to evaluate the priority of the identified UXO-SSRs. The approach can appropriately handle the hybrid uncertainties (i.e., hesitancy, fuzziness and randomness) of linguistic evaluation information, thereby improving the accuracy of evaluation results. Finally, a case study of smart sleep service system is presented to demonstrate the feasibility and reliability of the proposed framework.     

Supporting social interaction with smart phones

The smart phone offers communication, connectivity, content consumption, and content creativity. Seven different systems exemplify its ability to support a wide range of social interactions, helping make pervasive computing a reality. For smart phones to become successful pervasive system components, they must support and enhance various user activities and offer useful, effective functionality. The systems the author have built focuses on augmenting and enhancing communication; they're communication devices first and computers second. The system supports social interaction between people n particular, interaction that would be difficult if not impossible to achieve without the smart phone technology. This dependency on the system endows them with a degree of utility that drives their effectiveness, which is key to increasing the use of pervasive systems.     

Human interaction with IoT-based smart environments

This paper describes concepts, design, implementation, and performance evaluation of a 3D-based user interface for accessing IoT-based Smart Environments (IoT-SE). The generic interaction model of the described work addresses some major challenges of Human-IoT-SE-Interaction such as cognitive overload associated with manual device selection in complex IoT-SE, loss of user control, missing system image or over-automation. To address these challenges we propose a 3D-based mobile interface for mixed-initiative interaction in IoT-SE. The 3D visualization and 3D UI, acting as the central feature of the system, create a logical link between physical devices and their virtual representation on the end user’s mobile devices. By so doing, the user can easily identify a device within the environment based on its position, orientation, and form, and access the identified devices through the 3D interface for direct manipulation within the scene. This overcomes the problem of manual device selection. In addition, the 3D visualization provides a system image for the IoT-SE, which supports users in understanding the ambience and things going on in it. Furthermore, the mobile interface allows users to control the amount and the way the IoT-SE automates the environment. For example, users can stop or postpone system triggered automatic actions, if they don’t like or want them. Users also can remove a rule forever. By so doing, users can delete smart behaviors of their IoT-SE. This helps to overcome the automation challenges. In this paper, we present the design, implementation and evaluation of the proposed interaction system. We chose smart meeting rooms as the context for prototyping and evaluating our interaction concepts. However, the presented concepts and methods are generic and could be adapted to similar environments such as smart homes. We conducted a subjective usability evaluation (ISO-Norm 9241/110) with 16 users. All in one the study results indicate that the proposed 3D-User Interface achieved a good high score according to the ISO-Norm scores.     

Cryptanalysis and improvement on two efficient remote user authentication scheme using smart cards

In 2002, Chien et al. proposed an efficient remote authentication scheme using smart cards, in which only few hashing operations are required. Later, Ku et al. gave an improved scheme to repair the security pitfalls found in Chien et al.'s scheme. Also Yoon et al. presented an enhancement on Ku et al.'s scheme. In this paper, we show that both Ku et al.'s scheme and Yoon et al.'s scheme are still vulnerable to the guessing attack, forgery attack and denial of service (DoS) attack. In addition, their schemes lack efficiency when users input wrong passwords. To remedy these flaws, this paper proposes an efficient improvement over Ku et al.'s and Yoon et al.'s schemes with more security. The computation cost, security, and efficiency of the improved scheme are embarking for the real application in the resource-limited environment.