Neuro-cognitively inspired haptic user interfaces

Haptic systems and devices are a recent addition to multimodal systems. These devices have widespread applications such as surgical simulations, medical and procedural training, scientific visualizations, assistive and rehabilitative devices for individuals who have physical or neurological impediments and assistive devices for individuals who are blind. While the potential of haptics in natural human machine interaction is undisputable, the realization of such means is still a long way ahead. There are considerable research challenges to development of natural haptic interfaces. The study of human tactile abilities is a recent endeavor and many of the available systems still do not incorporate the domain knowledge of psychophysics, biomechanics and neurological elements of haptic perception. Development of smart and effective haptic interfaces and devices requires extensive studies that link perceptual phenomena with measurable parameters and incorporation of such domain knowledge in the engineering of haptic interfaces. This paper presents design, development and usability testing of a neuro-cognitively inspired haptic user interface for individuals who are blind. The proposed system design is inspired by neuro-cognitive basis of haptic perception and incorporates the computational aspects and requirements of multimodal information processing system. Usability testing of the system suggests that a biologically inspired haptic user interfaces may form a powerful paradigm for haptic user interface design.

Universal access to information services—the need for user information and its relationship to device profiles

Users access information services with a variety of devices and with different interaction modes that depend on personal characteristics (including disabilities) and on the context of usage. With the appearance of mobile devices, the industry has focused its efforts on the standardization of device characteristics, thus giving to information providers some content adaptation facilities. However, little attention has been paid to the standardization of user profiles that will allow further customization and adaptation capabilities in mainstream services. This paper will present the authors experiences in outlining and implementing user profiles, as well as possible integration paths with device characteristics.

Device Management in the IMS

IMS is the only standardized way to offer IP based services that are enabled by one common core and all types of access networks and devices. The management of devices can benefit services enabling and improve user experience. This paper presents the device management issues in the IMS. Requirements of device management are presented and a management architecture is proposed to satisfy the requirements. The architecture utilizes distributed design by separating management and executing functionalities and provides service provisioning and tracing functionalities to application servers utilizing some IMS capabilities. Some approaches to integrate more IMS capabilities in device management architecture are discussed. A possible evaluation model for quality of device management from the perspective of user and management authority is proposed.

Guided interaction: A mechanism to enable ad hoc service interaction

Ad hoc interaction between web services and their clients is a worthwhile but seemingly distant goal. At present, most of the interest in web services is focused on pre-planned B2B interaction. Clients interact with services using advance knowledge of the data and sequence requirements of the service and pre-programmed calls to their interfaces. This type of interaction cannot be used for ad hoc interaction between services and their clients such as mobile devices moving in and around rich dynamic environments because clients may not have the necessary knowledge in advance. For unplanned ad hoc interaction an interaction mechanism is required that does not require clients to have advance knowledge of programmatic service interfaces and interaction sequences. The mechanism must ensure clients with different resources and diverse competencies can successfully interact with newly discovered services by providing assistance such as disambiguation of terminology, alternative types of inputs, and context sensitive error reporting when necessary. This paper introduces a service interaction mechanism called guided interaction. Guided interaction is designed to enable clients without prior knowledge of programmatic interfaces to be assisted to a successful outcome. The mechanism is grounded in core computing primitives and based on a dialogue model. Guided interaction has two parts; the first part is a language for the exchange of information between services and their clients. The second part is a language for services to create interaction plans that allow them to gather the data they require from clients in a flexible way with the provision of assistance when necessary. An interpreter uses the plan to generate and interpret messages in the exchange language and to manage the path of the dialogue.

Validation methods for an accessible user interface for a rehabilitation robot

This paper describes the research methods required for the development and validation of a user interface for a wheelchair mounted manipulator for use by severely disabled persons. It explains the construction of the interface using tasks to define the user interface architecture. It outlines the experiments used to evaluate the user responses and draws conclusions about the effectiveness of the whole system. A systematic procedure is defined to obtain numerical estimates of the effectiveness of task analysis for individual use. This approach marries engineering procedures with a consideration of the human interaction. The prototype robot used several gesture recognition systems to achieve a better level of accessibility and usability than other robots used for rehabilitation at this time. Two different approaches to user interfaces were tested with different input devices.

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Intelligent Network Provisioning for Dynamically Downloadable Applications in Beyond 3G Mobile Networks

Mobile communications beyond 3G will integrate different (but complementary) access technologies into a common platform to deliver value-added services and multimedia content in an optimum way. However, the numerous possible configurations of mobile networks complicated the dynamic deployment of mobile applications. Therefore, research is intensely seeking a service provisioning framework that is technology-independent, supports multiple wireless network technologies, and can interwork high-level service management tasks to network management operations. This paper presents an open value chain paradigm, a model for downloadable applications and a mediating platform for service provisioning in beyond 3G mobile settings. Furthermore, we introduce mechanisms that support a coupled interaction between service deployment and network configuration operations, focusing on the dynamic provisioning of QoS state to data path devices according to the requirements of dynamically downloadable mobile value-added services (VAS).

Bridging the physical and virtual worlds by local connectivity-based physical selection

The prevalent visions of ambient intelligence emphasise natural interaction between user and functions and services embedded in the environment or available through mobile devices. In these scenarios the physical and virtual worlds seamlessly gear into each other, making crossing the border between these worlds natural or even invisible to the user. The bottleneck in reaching these scenarios appear in the natural mapping between the physical objects and their virtual counterparts. The emergence of local connectivity in mobile devices opens possibilities for implementing novel user interface paradigms to enhance this mapping. We present physical selection paradigm for implementing an intuitive human technology interaction for mobile devices. In order to demonstrate the feasibility of the paradigm we implemented two experimental set-ups using commercially available smart phones with IrDA connectivity. The experiments involved selecting a website by physically pointing at its symbol and making a phone call by pointing at an icon representing the person to be called. In tentative user experiments the physical selection method was more time-efficient and it was perceived more positively by the users than a conventional method.

Information systems design: through adaptivity to ubiquity

In a globalised economy the accessibility of services becomes increasingly important for businesses. This has led to a demand that information systems should be ubiquitous in the sense that they are available to all users under all circumstances, everywhere and at all times, and independent of the access devices and channels used. The authors believe the key to meeting that demand is existence of an omnipresent media of interaction and existence of information systems that within that media adapt themselves to context parameters at run-time. The World Wide Web is considered as that omnipresent media. Thus, the task is left to design adaptive information systems in a way that avoids unnecessary replication. In this article it will be shown how context parameters can be utilised to enable system adaptivity. The latter is supposed to increase usability and targets the quality of use, the content, and the functionality. We propose using an algebraic approach that aids in providing the leanest appropriate interface via user typing and story boarding. Our approach furthermore limits the content delivered to a user to the amount that can be dealt with in a usage scenario. The latter is based on defining hyphenation points within the content.

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Evaluating a modified Google user interface via screen reader

This paper describes the progress of a research project aimed at improving the usability of web search tools for blind users who interact via screen readers and voice synthesizers. In the first stage of research, specific guidelines were proposed for simplifying the interaction with search engines for the blind. To evaluate these criteria, they were applied to Google user interfaces, by re-implementing the search form as well as the results page. Finally, the redesigned interfaces were evaluated through remote testing with 12 totally blind users. The results highlighted how Google, although already accessible, may be further improved in order to simplify interaction for people with impaired vision.

Ubiquitous enterprise service adaptations based on contextual user behavior

Recent advances in mobile technologies and infrastructures have created the demand for ubiquitous access to enterprise services from mobile handheld devices. Further, with the invention of new interaction devices, the context in which the services are being used becomes an integral part of the activity carried out with the system. Traditional human–computer interface (HCI) theories are now inadequate for developing these context-aware applications, as we believe that the notion of context should be extended to different categories: computing contexts, user contexts, and physical contexts for ubiquitous computing. This demands a new paradigm for system requirements elicitation and design in order to make good use of such extended context information captured from mobile user behavior. Instead of redesigning or adapting existing enterprise services in an ad hoc manner, we introduce a methodology for the elicitation of context-aware adaptation requirements and the matching of context-awareness features to the target context by capability matching. For the implementation of such adaptations, we propose the use of three tiers of views: user interface views, data views, and process views. This approach centers on a novel notion of process views to ubiquitous service adaptation, where mobile users may execute a more concise version or modified procedure of the original process according to their behavior under different contexts. The process view also serves as the key mechanism for integrating user interface views and data views. Based on this model, we analyze the design and implementation issues of some common ubiquitous access situations and show how to adapt them systematically into a context-aware application by considering the requirements of a ubiquitous enterprise information system.

Situated play in a tangible interface and adaptive audio museum guide

This paper explores the design issues of situated play within a museum through the study of a museum guide prototype that integrates a tangible interface, audio display, and adaptive modeling. We discuss our use of design ethnography in order to situate our interaction and to investigate the liminal and engagement qualities of a museum visit. The paper provides an overview of our case study and analysis of our user evaluation. We discuss the implications including degrees of balance in the experience design of play in interaction; the challenge in developing a discovery-based information model, and the need for a better understanding of the contextual aspects of tangible user interfaces (TUIs). We conclude that learning effectiveness and functionality can be balanced productively with playful interaction through an adaptive audio and TUI if designers balance the engagement between play and the environment, and the space between imagination and interpretation that links the audio content to the artifacts.

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Agent-based multimedia presentation and adaptation service

In this paper, we aim to provide adaptive multimedia services especially video ones to end-users in an efficient and secure manner. Users moving outside the office should be able to maintain an office-like environment at their current locations. First, the agents within our proposed architecture negotiate the different communication and interaction factors autonomously and dynamically. Moreover, we needed to develop a user agent in addition to service and system agents that could negotiate the requirements and capabilities at run time to furnish best possible service results. Thus we designed and integrated a video indexing and key framing service within our overall agent-based architecture. We integrated this video indexing and content-based analysis service to adapt the video content according to run time conditions. We designed a video XML schema to validate the media content out of this multimedia service according to specific requirements and features, as we will describe later.

Understanding and capturing people’s privacy policies in a mobile social networking application

A number of mobile applications have emerged that allow users to locate one another. However, people have expressed concerns about the privacy implications associated with this class of software, suggesting that broad adoption may only happen to the extent that these concerns are adequately addressed. In this article, we report on our work on PeopleFinder, an application that enables cell phone and laptop users to selectively share their locations with others (e.g. friends, family, and colleagues). The objective of our work has been to better understand people’s attitudes and behaviors towards privacy as they interact with such an application, and to explore technologies that empower users to more effectively and efficiently specify their privacy preferences (or “policies”). These technologies include user interfaces for specifying rules and auditing disclosures, as well as machine learning techniques to refine user policies based on their feedback. We present evaluations of these technologies in the context of one laboratory study and three field studies.

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Quick patching: an overlay multicast scheme for supporting video on demand in wireless networks

Many overlay multicast schemes have been proposed recently at the application level to support video-on-demand service over the Internet. With the proliferation of mobile devices and the increasing coverage of high speed wireless networks, such services are likely to be extended to support clients connected to the Internet through a wireless last hop. However, existing application level multicast schemes are not designed to handle the characteristics of the noisy wireless links. In this paper we propose an overlay multicast scheme called Quick Patching which arranges additional patch streams to clients under poor link conditions to improve their clients’ viewing quality. We demonstrate through extensive simulation experiments that Quick Patching is not only scalable, but can also sustain the required viewing quality under different network conditions including fluctuating error conditions as well as heterogeneous user viewing quality requirements.

The design of natural interaction

This paper addresses the problem of the relationship between humans and technology-enhanced spaces and physical objects (later defined as artifacts). The class of cases here analyzed includes interactive digital signage, information kiosks, home media centers and interactive spaces whose purpose is the communication of a meaning. In this domain, complex interfaces are not needed, as common people interaction with information, content and media is in most cases extremely simple. The topic of specialized interfaces for expert users is not addressed here; the focus is on interfaces for the general public, whose main purpose is the basic fruition of digital information, although such information can be large and complex in its organization. This paper is centered on the need of conceiving computer sensing and information presentation as different aspects of the same interaction design problem, instead of separate research entities.

Mid-air display experiments to create novel user interfaces

Displays are the most visible part of most computer applications. Novel display technologies strongly influence and inspire new forms of computer use and interaction. We are particularly interested in the interplay of novel displays and interaction for ubiquitous computing or ambient media environments, as emerging display technologies may become game-changers in how we define and use computers, possibly changing the context of computing fundamentally. We present some of our experiments and lessons learnt with a new category of displays, the “immaterial” FogScreen. It can be described as a novel media platform, exhibiting some fundamental differences to and advantages over other displays. It also enables novel kinds of user interfaces and experiences. In this paper we give insights about the special properties and strengths of the FogScreen by looking at a set of successfully demonstrated interfaces and applications. We also discuss its future potential for user interface design.

Using short-range communication to control mobile device functionality

This paper describes a prototype system, ZoneIT, for selectively controlling the functionality of mobile devices, e.g. the ringing of cellular telephones. ZoneIT exploits the fact that many such devices have short-range radio communication systems (e.g. Bluetooth and ZigBee). It uses such radio systems to allow these devices to communicate with Base Stations to learn what functionality is permissible in a particular zone. ZoneIT is secured by a process that enables mobile devices to authenticate base stations, and so protect against denial of service attacks.

Enabling Routes of Road Network Constrained Movements as Mobile Service Context

With the continuing advances in wireless communications, geo-positioning, and portable electronics, an infrastructure is emerging that enables the delivery of on-line, location-enabled services to very large numbers of mobile users. A typical usage situation for mobile services is one characterized by a small screen and no keyboard, and by the service being only a secondary focus of the user. Under such circumstances, it is particularly important to deliver the “right” information and service at the right time, with as little user interaction as possible. This may be achieved by making services context aware. Mobile users frequently follow the same route to a destination as they did during previous trips to the destination, and the route and destination constitute important aspects of the context for a range of services. This paper presents key concepts underlying a software component that identifies and accumulates the routes of a user along with their usage patterns and that makes the routes available to services. The problems associated with of route recording are analyzed, and algorithms that solve the problems are presented. Experiences from using the component on logs of GPS positions acquired from vehicles traveling within a real road network are reported.

Quality analysis of composed services through fault injection

Web service composition can be adopted to develop information systems through integration of services to obtain complex composed services. While interfaces of services are known at composition time, the quality of a composed service may depend on the ability of its component services to react to unforeseen situations, such as data quality problems and service coordination problems. In this work, we propose an approach to analyze the quality of composed services using fault injection techniques, by inspecting the reaction of a composed process to injected faults; the aim is to assess the process quality in terms of fault monitoring and, more generally, fault tolerance capabilities. The component services are analyzed either as black-boxes, when only input and output messages are considered or as white-boxes, when data sources used by services are considered. A test bed is illustrated on a selected example, and results of extensive testing are discussed and framed into a process analysis methodology.

Interacting with mobile services: an evaluation of camera-phones and visual tags

We present a study of using camera-phones and visual-tags to access mobile services. Firstly, a user-experience study is described in which participants were both observed learning to interact with a prototype mobile service and interviewed about their experiences. Secondly, a pointing-device task is presented in which quantitative data was gathered regarding the speed and accuracy with which participants aimed and clicked on visual-tags using camera-phones. We found that participants’ attitudes to visual-tag-based applications were broadly positive, although they had several important reservations about camera-phone technology more generally. Data from our pointing-device task demonstrated that novice users were able to aim and click on visual-tags quickly (well under 3 s per pointing-device trial on average) and accurately (almost all meeting our defined speed/accuracy tradeoff of 6% error-rate). Based on our findings, design lessons for camera-phone and visual-tag applications are presented.

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