Exploring and modeling unimanual object manipulation on multi-touch displays

Touch-sensitive devices are becoming increasingly wide-spread, and consequently gestural interfaces have become familiar to the public. Despite the fact that many gestures require frequently dragging, pinching, spreading, and rotating the finger-tips, there currently does not exist a human performance model describing this interaction. In this paper, a novel user performance model is derived for virtual object manipulation on touch-sensitive displays, which involves simultaneous translation, rotation, and scaling of the object. Two controlled experiments with dual-finger unimanual manipulations were conducted to validate the new model. The results indicate that the model fits the experimental data well (with R² and R values above 0.9), and performs the best among several alternative models. Moreover, based on the analysis of the empirical data, the simultaneity nature of manipulation in the task is explored and several design implications are provided.     

An Experimental Study on Three General Interface Layout Designs for Chemical Process Plants

The human‐machine interface design is not a new problem; however, existing knowledge appears to be focused either on interface conceptual design, which determines what information at what time needs to be displayed, or on interface detailed design, which determines the form of display elements. This article presents a study on interface layout design. Three interface layout designs were proposed based on the proximity compatibility priniciple, which were on the same interface conceptual design. In particular, the first interface layout design is with the highest degree of proximity cognition and the second and third with a reduced degree of proximity cognition. They are called sophisticated, semisophisticated, and nonsophisticated interfaces, respectively. An experiment with a simple process plant was conducted to understand user behaviors on the three interfaces. It is noted that in order to provide an unbiased comparative evaluation of these interfaces the same application problem and similar look‐and‐feel forms of interfaces were designed. In the experiment, three general classes of tasks were considered, namely, normal control operation, fault detection (or monitoring), and fault diagnosis. Two categories of measures were used: the performance measure and the subjective measure. The major results obtained from the experiment are 1) the nonsophisticated interface is the best for fault detections in terms of performance measure; besides, this interface has the lowest mental workload for fault detection; 2) the sophisticated interface is the best for normal operation in terms of performance measure; 3) there appears no significant difference for fault diagnosis in terms of performance measures for all these three interfaces; 4) for normal operation and fault diagnosis, the mental workloads for the three interfaces have no significant difference. Overall, the experiment suggests that the nonsophisticated interface be used in practice with additional two reasons: 1) most of time in the chemical process plant today is the fault detection or operation monitoring task, and 2) it is relatively easier for the nonsophisticated interface to adapt to changes in the chemical process plant design, which are common in today's manufacturing environments.     

Signage Versus Environmental Affordances: Is the Explicit Information Strong Enough to Guide Human Behavior During a Wayfinding Task?

This study aims to explore how people behave when they have to find a location within a complex building and are confronted with situations where directional signage (i.e., explicit information) is in opposition to environmental affordances that naturally direct users towards a specific path, creating a situation with conflicting information (e.g., a brighter corridor vs. a darker corridor but with a directional sign indicating to follow the darker one). A virtual reality–based methodology was used and a between‐subject design was considered. Thus, participants were given the tasks of finding three publicly accessible central points in a virtual hotel and confronted with a two forced‐choice task of local scenes in which environmental variables (i.e., corridor width and brightness) and signage varied systematically, in two experimental conditions (i.e., neutral and signage). For the signage condition, signs were inserted to explicitly point in the opposite direction than that implicitly suggested by the environmental affordances, creating situations with conflicting information. Results indicate that environmental variables were able to direct people indoors acting as environmental affordances. Users preferred to follow the wider and brighter paths. However, when directional signage pointed in the opposite direction of the paths preferred by the participants, most of them complied with signage.     

Mobilizing Company Members' Full Innovative Potential

Most of the literature on innovation management highlights the fundamental role played by people in the innovation process and the need to fully develop the creative and innovative potential of organizations' members. This article offers the result of extensive research carried out among some of the most innovative companies in the Basque Country, a highly innovative region located in the north of Spain. It draws interesting conclusions about how these innovative companies combine strong leadership, human resource practices, and an organizational culture that enhances innovation capabilities among the company's employees. More specifically, it answers questions such as the following: Are human resources policies, leadership, and innovation culture implemented equally in Basque innovative companies? Do companies make the same effort in deploying these elements or routines and practices related to them? Can we see a pattern in the use of these elements among innovative firms? © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

An Integrated Model of the Toyota Production System with Total Quality Management and People Factors

The Toyota production system (TPS), or lean production, has been associated with many benefits for manufacturing firms that implement the system. However, to implement the TPS successfully, it is necessary to integrate the so‐called “hard side” of the system (that is, the technical aspects of material handling) with the “soft side” of the program (that is, the aspects associated with human factors). The present study makes a contribution to such a holistic view of the TPS by proposing an integrated model that consists of the technical aspects of the TPS, together with elements associated with total quality management (TQM), human resources management (HRM), and certain identified “people factors.” The study then uses structural equation modeling (SEM) to test this holistic model using data obtained from a questionnaire survey of 153 Taiwanese manufacturing firms. The empirical study confirms the appropriateness of the causal model, which is evaluated by several goodness‐of‐fit methods. The study confirms the proposition that the inclusion of the “people factors” together with TQM and HRM significantly improves the realization of benefits associated with the TPS practices of “just‐in‐time” (JIT) and “autonomation.” The conclusion is that such an integrated model provides a much more effective “lean system” and has the potential to produce significantly enhanced benefits for firms that implement it. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

From big smartphone data to worldwide research: The Mobile Data Challenge

This paper presents an overview of the Mobile Data Challenge (MDC), a large-scale research initiative aimed at generating innovations around smartphone-based research, as well as community-based evaluation of mobile data analysis methodologies. First, we review the Lausanne Data Collection Campaign (LDCC), an initiative to collect unique longitudinal smartphone dataset for the MDC. Then, we introduce the Open and Dedicated Tracks of the MDC, describe the specific datasets used in each of them, discuss the key design and implementation aspects introduced in order to generate privacy-preserving and scientifically relevant mobile data resources for wider use by the research community, and summarize the main research trends found among the 100+ challenge submissions. We finalize by discussing the main lessons learned from the participation of several hundred researchers worldwide in the MDC Tracks.     

基于SVM的人脸检测研究

支持向量机（SVM）是在统计学习理论基础上发展起来的一种新的机器学习算法。依据SVM良好识别和泛化能力,实现了一种基于支持向量机的图像人脸识别方法。利用Opencv提取样本类的低层特征,训练具有径向基核函数的SVM分类器,在VS2008和Qt平台下实现识别软件开发。运行结果表明,软件具有良好的图像人脸检测能力。     

Human eye sclera detection and tracking using a modified time-adaptive self-organizing map

This paper investigates the use of time-adaptive self-organizing map (TASOM)-based active contour models (ACMs) for detecting the boundaries of the human eye sclera and tracking its movements in a sequence of images. The task begins with extracting the head boundary based on a skin-color model. Then the eye strip is located with an acceptable accuracy using a morphological method. Eye features such as the iris center or eye corners are detected through the iris edge information. TASOM-based ACM is used to extract the inner boundary of the eye. Finally, by tracking the changes in the neighborhood characteristics of the eye-boundary estimating neurons, the eyes are tracked effectively. The original TASOM algorithm is found to have some weaknesses in this application. These include formation of undesired twists in the neuron chain and holes in the boundary, lengthy chain of neurons, and low speed of the algorithm. These weaknesses are overcome by introducing a new method for finding the winning neuron, a new definition for unused neurons, and a new method of feature selection and application to the network. Experimental results show a very good performance for the proposed method in general and a better performance than that of the gradient vector field (GVF) snake-based method.     

VICUR: A human-vision-based algorithm for curve reconstruction

In this paper, a new algorithm, named VICUR, is presented for curve reconstruction problem. From a set of unorganized points, the proposed algorithm can construct curves that look natural to human vision. The VICUR algorithm is based on two connectivity criteria: proximity and good continuation from the prominent Gestalt principles of perception. Experimental results are presented to show the effectiveness of VICUR.